Shlomo Zilberstein

Shlomo Zilberstein is a Professor of Computer Science and former Associate Dean of Research and Engagement at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. He directs the Resource-Bounded Reasoning Lab and holds a B.A. from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on automated reasoning, planning under uncertainty, multi-agent systems, and decision-theoretic principles for autonomous agents. He has pioneered work on decentralized Markov Decision Processes (DEC-MDPs) and meta-reasoning mechanisms to optimize deliberation under computational constraints.

Dr. Zilberstein has received prestigious awards, including the 2025 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the 2019 AAAI Distinguished Service Award, and the 2019 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and held leadership roles in AAAI, ICAPS, and the AI Access Foundation.

His research spans theoretical foundations and practical applications in autonomous systems, including safe AI, ethical decision-making, and human-centered AI. He has led multi-institutional grants, such as a $5M NSF grant to improve causal decision-making and a Schmidt Science grant for multi-agent AI safety.

Zilberstein’s work emphasizes balancing computational efficiency with rational action in uncertain environments, with applications in robotics, self-driving vehicles, and collaborative systems. His lab develops frameworks for competence-aware autonomy, introspective perception, and explainable AI systems.