2025 ACM SIGAI / AAMAS Autonomous Agents Award
Shlomo Zilberstein
The selection committee for the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award is pleased to announce that Professor Shlomo Zilberstein is the recipient of the 2025 award. Shlomo Zilberstein is Professor of Computer Science and former Associate Dean of Research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work established the field of decentralized Markov Decision Processes (DEC-MDPs), laying the groundwork for decision-theoretic planning in multi-agent systems and multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). These contributions have become a cornerstone of multi-agent decision-making, influencing researchers and practitioners alike. A Fellow of AAAI and the ACM, Professor Zilberstein has received numerous awards, including the UMass Chancellor’s Medal, the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award, and the AAAI Distinguished Service Award.
Invited talk
TITLE: The Long Road to Long-Term Autonomy
DATE & TIME: Thursday, May 22, 4:30PM – 5:30PM
LOCATION: Ambassador Ballroom Salons 1+2, 3rd Floor
CHAIR: Edith Elkind
ABSTRACT: Long-term autonomy refers to the ability of intelligent agents to operate independently for extended periods, adapting to changing environments, managing limited resources, and maintaining reliable performance with minimal human oversight. This talk presents a series of research contributions from my lab that address the fundamental challenges of long-term autonomy. These include metareasoning mechanisms for managing deliberation before action; concurrent reasoning and execution for responsiveness in real time; planning and acting under uncertainty and partial observability; operating in complex open-world settings with an unbounded number of other agents; learning self-competence models to guide action selection and determine when to seek assistance; and techniques for aligning agent behavior with human values and objectives through rich, interpretable feedback such as demonstrations and explanations. Ultimately, the objective of long-term autonomy is not to eliminate human involvement but to enable scalable and cost-effective collaboration between humans and intelligent agents.
The list of winners of this award from 2001 to 2025 can be viewed here: https://sigai.acm.org/main/autonomous-agents-research-award/