Prizes

Israeli AI Safety Research Prize

The Association for Long Term Existence & Resilience (ALTER), together with the Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence (IAAI), established the Israeli AI Safety Research Prize in 2025 to promote research on AI safety.

Please see the Call for Nominations for the 2026 Israeli AI Safety Research Prize.

Deadline: December 30th, 2026.

IAAI Best PhD Thesis Award

The Israeli Association for Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) established the IAAI Doctoral Dissertation Award program in 2018 to recognize superior research and writing by doctoral candidates in Israel studying Artificial Intelligence.

Details about the IAAI Best PhD Thesis Award 2027 will be published soon.

Past Winners

Israeli AI Safety Research Prize:

• 2025
  • Winner: Yonatan Slutzky, Yotam Alexander, Noam Razin, and Nadav Cohen. The Implicit Bias of Structured State Space Models Can Be Poisoned With Clean Labels.
  • Honorable mention: Rom Himelstein, Amit LeVi, Brit Youngmann, Yaniv Nemcovsky, and Avi Mendelson. Silenced Biases: The Dark Side LLMs Learned to Refuse.
  • Honorable mention: Ofir Cohen, Gil Ari Agmon, Asaf Shabtai, and Rami Puzis. LISAA: A Framework for Large Language Model Information Security Awareness Assessment.
  • Prize sponsored by ALTER.

IAAI Best PhD Thesis Award:

• 2026
  • Winner: Dr. Argaman Mordoch, Ben-Gurion University. PhD thesis: Learning Safe Environment Models for Planning. Advised by Prof. Roni Stern.
  • Runner-up: Dr. Nitay Alon, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. PhD thesis: The Role of Theory of Mind in Bayesian Mixed Motive Games. Advised by Prof. Jeff Rosenschein and Dr. Peter Dayan.​
  • Committee members: Chen Hajaj, Or Litany.
  • Award sponsored by Google.
• 2025
  • Winner: Dr. Saar Cohen, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Coalition Formation in Sequential Decision-Making under Uncertainty. Advised by Prof. Noa Agmon.
  • Runner-up: Dr. Hadas Orgad, Tel Aviv University. PhD thesis: On the Robustness of AI Models: Explanations, Evaluations, and Improvements. Advised by Prof. Yonatan Belinkov.​
  • Committee members: Roni Stern, Idan Szpektor.
  • Award sponsored by Google.
• 2024
  • Winner: Dr. Shauli Ravfogel, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Analyzing, Interpreting, and Controlling Language Model Representations. Advised by Prof. Yoav Goldberg.
  • Runner-up: Dr. Alon Jacovi, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Explaining Artificial Intelligence: Foundations and Practice. Advised by Prof. Yoav Goldberg​
  • Committee members: Claudia Goldman, Roi Reichart.
  • Award sponsored by Google
• 2023
  • Winner: Dr. Roei Herzig, Tel Aviv University. PhD thesis: Towards Compositionality in Computer Vision. Advised by Prof. Amir Globerson.​
  • Runner-up: Dr. Yanai Elazar, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Revealing Capabilities of Language Models. Advised by Prof. Yoav Goldberg.
  • Committee members: Gilad Katz, Segev Wasserkrug
  • Award sponsored by Google.
• 2022
  • Winner: Dr. Leshem Choshen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. PhD thesis: Improving Neural Machine Translation using Semantic Structure. Advised by Prof. Omri Abend.​
  • Runner-up: Dr. Hila Gonen, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Multilinguality and Bias in Language Modeling. Advised by Prof. Yoav Goldberg.
  • Committee members: Carmel Domshlak, Gal Kaminka.
• 2021
  • Winner: Dr. Omer Ben-Porat, Technion. PhD thesis: Strategic Behavior in prediction and recommendation. Advised by Prof. Moshe Tennenholtz.​
  • Runner-up: Dr. Roee Aharoni, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: Topics in Sequence-to-sequence learning in NLP. Advised by Prof. Ido Dagan.
  • Committee members: Onn Shenory, Shaul Markovitch.
• 2020
  • Winner: Dr Yossi Adi, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: On the Robustness of Deep Neural Models and their Applications to Speech Science. Advised by Prof. Joseph Keshet.
  • Runner-up: Dr. Yossi Arjevani, Weizmann Institute. PhD thesis: On the Theoretical Foundations of Large-Scale Optimization with Applications in Machine Learning. Advised by Prof. Ohad Shamir.
  • Committee members: Omer Lev, Jeff Rosenschein, David Sarne, Aya Soffer.
• 2019
  • Winner: Dr Avi Segal, Ben-Gurion University. PhD thesis: Intelligent Intervention Design in Large Scale Task Systems. Advised by Prof. Kobi Gal.
  • Committee members: Noa Agmon, Claudia Goldman.
  • Award sponsored by Intuition Robotics.
• 2018
  • Winner: Dr Mor Vered, Bar-Ilan University. PhD thesis: A General Approach for Plan and Goal Recognition. Advised by Prof. Gal Kaminka.
  • Committee members: Claudia Goldman, Gila Kamhi, Roi Reshef.
  • Award sponsored by General Motors.