Dr. Munindar P. Singh is the SAS Institute Distinguished Professor and an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.

Munindar’s research addresses how to develop artificial intelligence (AI) agents that are responsive to human needs, cooperate effectively with each other, and behave ethically and safely singly and in ensembles. Broadly, his research provides a cohesive computational foundation for modeling the interplay of the social and technical aspects of software-intensive sociotechnical systems. Such applications wherever multiple humans interact as in information sharing and privacy, business processes, and transportation.

Through groundbreaking early research, expository writing (including books), advising graduate students, mentoring junior colleagues, and professional leadership, Munindar helped form and nurture the areas of multiagent systems and service-oriented computing.

Munindar founded NC State’s efforts on AI ethics and safety, uniting researchers from the colleges of Engineering, Humanities &s; Social Sciences, Management, and Education. Munindar’s leadership has led to thriving collaborations involving transportation networks, electric vehicle charging, humanitarian logistics, personal sensors for health and wellbeing, models of risk perception, and workforce development. NCSU has won several NSF projects. Munindar is leading an effort to launch an interdisciplinary graduate program on AI in Society.

Munindar’s computational model for sociotechnical systems supports reasoning about accountability regarding requirements such as privacy and safety, which address the societal aspects of cybersecurity. This approach uses high-level constructs based on legal and social norms. He showed how to represent norms computationally and compute them unambiguously over databases and blockchains. His current work considers consent and trust as well as ways to learn user expectations from app reviews and social media.

Munindar originated the “public” semantics for communication between agents. Whereas traditional approaches to communication focus solely on the bits exchanged, Munindar’s approach declaratively represents the meaning of a communication in terms of how it relies on or affects the social relationship between the communicating parties. Doing so makes possible the construction of AI agents who can reason about communications in terms that are intelligible to human users.

Munindar proposed a novel approach for specifying interaction protocols based on causal dependencies and integrity constraints, eliminating avoidable coupling between agents. Thus, a protocol yields the largest possible set of alternative enactments—promoting participants’ autonomy by giving them the greatest possible flexibility. Munindar developed formal techniques to verify whether a protocol is susceptible to deadlock or unsound interference. These techniques compute polynomial-time approximations of interference to verify correctness tractably.

Munindar studies AI ethics at a system level—concerning whether a sociotechnical system supports an ethical outcome, such as fair allocation or accountability. His research unites previously disparate models such as multiobjective decision making and computational models of human values and emotions. Endowing AI with psychosocial capabilities is essential for moral decision making.

Munindar is an inventor of 45 US patents. In 2017, Facebook acquired a portfolio of 35 of his patents on mobile services.

Munindar has been the editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing and the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology for a combined 10 years. He used his leadership position to identify and nurture nascent subcommunities and recruited and mentored numerous associate editors and guest editors, including several women and first-time editors. His current editorial service includes IEEE Internet Computing, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology.

Munindar has served on expert panels for the Army Research Office and the US Department of Health and Human Services and as an advisor to large international projects. He served on the founding board of directors of IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. Munindar served on the founding steering committee for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and on the editorial board of the Journal of Web Semantics. Munindar was a general cochair for the 2005 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, the 2016 International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, and the 2022 IEEE Services Computing Conference.

Munindar is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), and was elected a foreign member of Academia Europaea (honoris causa). He has won the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the IEEE TCSVC Research Innovation Award, and the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. He won NC State University’s Outstanding Graduate Faculty Mentor Award and the Outstanding Research Achievement Award (twice). He was selected as an Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor and elected to NCSU’s Research Leadership Academy.

Munindar’s research has been recognized with awards and sponsorship by (alphabetically) Army Research Lab, Army Research Office, Cisco Systems, Consortium for Ocean Leadership, DARPA, Department of Defense, Ericsson, Facebook, IBM, Intel, National Science Foundation, and Xerox.

Thirty-four students have received PhD degrees and forty-one MS degrees under Munindar’s direction.