Draft:Adam Shwartz

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Adam Shwartz
אדם שורץ
Education	Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Brown University
Known for	Applied stochastic processes Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute
Scientific career
Fields	Electrical and Computer Engineering
Workplaces	Technion
Thesis	(1983)
Doctoral advisor	Harold J. Kushner

Adam Shwartz (born: 1953; Hebrew: אדם שורץ) is an Israeli professor emeritus at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He served as Dean of the Technion's Faculty of Electrical Engineering and as Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion. He also served as director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech.

Early life and education

Shwartz was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1953. He received B.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and in physics, both cum laude, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1979. He subsequently studied at Brown University, where he received a master's degree in applied mathematics in 1981 and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1983. His doctoral advisor was H. J. Kushner.

Academic career

Shwartz began his academic career as a visiting assistant professor at Brown University's Division of Applied Mathematics in 1982-1983 and subsequently as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. He joined the Technion as a Lecturer in 1984.

At the Technion, Shwartz became a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and held the Julius M. and Bernice Naiman Chair in Engineering. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering from 2009 to 2013 and director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City from 2014 to 2016.

In 2017, Shwartz was appointed Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion. In this capacity, he also became chairman of the board of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. He served as Senior Executive Vice President until 2019.

In 2021, Shwartz became professor emeritus at the Technion. He became a Senior Researcher at the Samuel Neaman Institute, where his work focuses on long-term issues in higher education and technology.

Research

Shwartz's research is in applied probability, particularly the study of stochastic systems and their applications to engineering, primarily computer and communication networks. His research has included stochastic approximation and adaptive control, Markov decision processes, stochastic games, queueing systems, and stochastic networks.

Another major area of his later research has been large deviations, a mathematical framework for analyzing rare events in stochastic systems.

His recent research is in education.

Publications

Books

Shwartz co-authored with Alan Weiss the research monograph Large Deviations for Performance Analysis: Queues, Communication, and Computing, published in 1995. 

He co-edited, with Eugene A. Feinberg, the Handbook of Markov Decision Processes: Methods and Applications, published by Kluwer in 2002. He also co-edited, with Eddy Mayer-Wolf and Ely Merzbach, Stochastic Analysis; Liber Amicorum for Moshe Zakai, Academic Press, 1991.

Selected articles

• H.J. Kushner, A. Shwartz, “An invariant measure approach to the convergence of Stochastic Approximations with state-dependent noise,” SIAM J. Control Opt. 22 no. 1, pp. 13-27,1984.
• A. Shwartz and A. M. Makowski, “Comparing policies in Markov decision processes: Mandl’s lemma revisited,” Math. Operations Research 15 pp. 155–174, 1990.
• E. Altman and A. Shwartz, "Markov decision problems and state-action frequencies,” SIAM J. Control and Optimization 29 pp. 786–809, 1991.
• B. Lubachevsky, A. Shwartz and A. Weiss, “An analysis of rollback-based simulations,” ACM Transactions on Modelling and Computer Simulation 1 no. 2, pp. 154–193, 1991.
• E. Feinberg and A. Shwartz, “Markov decision models with weighted discounted criteria,” Math. of Operations Research 19 pp. 152–168, 1994.
• N. Shimkin and A. Shwartz, “Asymptotically Efficient Adaptive Strategies in Repeated Games, Part I: Certainty Equivalence Strategies,” Math. of Operations Research 20 pp. 743–767, 1995.
• R. Atar, P. Dupuis and A. Shwartz, “An escape time criterion in queueing networks: Asymptotic risk-sensitive control via differential games,” Math. of Operations Research 28 pp. 801–835, 2003.
• I. Ram, A. Shwartz, I. Roll, "Minding the gender gap in advanced STEM courses: effects of student preparedness and activity level," Instructional Science 53 pp.1457–1478, 2025.
  

Editorial activities

Shwartz has served in editorial positions at several journals in his field. These have included Area Editor of Mathematics of Operations Research and associate editor of Mathematics of Operations Research, Stochastic Systems, Queueing Systems, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

Students

Shwartz supervised Post-Doctoral researchers, Ph.D. students and M.Sc. students, including Eitan Altman

and Nahum Shimkin.

Academic and professional leadership

Shwartz also held a number of administrative positions at the Technion. From 1998 to 2001 he served as Vice Dean for Undergraduate Studies for information technologies. From 2000 to 2009 he was responsible for the administrative information systems at the Technion, as Deputy VP for administration and finance, and led the implementation of the Technion's ERP system.

As Dean of Electrical Engineering, Shwartz co-founded, with Prof. Eli Biham - the Dean of Computer Science - the Technion's Computer Engineering Center.

He was involved in the establishment of the Jacobs Technion–Cornell Institute and later served as its director and chaired its board of directors.

In 2018-2019, Shwartz chaired the Rector Forum of VERA, the Association of University Heads in Israel.

Since 2025 Shwartz is also the Chairman of the Board of Robophysics Israel Ltd, a non-for-profit STEM education initiative.

Shwartz is also involved in "Kibbutz Hi-Tech", an initiative to establish technology hubs that will combine housing, work, and education in the Western Negev and the Galilee.

Personal life

Shwartz is married to Shoulamit, they live in Atlit and have three children and two grandchildren. He holds a US Commercial Pilot license, and is a member of the Table Tennis Associations of Israel and of the US.

External links

• Adam Shwartz, Technion page
• Adam Shwartz, Google scholar
• Adam Shwartz, IEEE
• Adam Shwartz, Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Adam Shwartz, LinkedIn