Announcing the Recipients of the 2026 Barel Travel Scholarships

The Center for AI and Data Science (TAD) at Tel Aviv University is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2026 Barel Travel Scholarships.

This year, 15 outstanding graduate students conducting research in artificial intelligence and data science across a wide range of disciplines at Tel Aviv University were selected by the TAD Scholarship Committee.

Each awardee will receive a travel grant of $500 to support participation in leading international scientific conferences and the presentation of their research to the global academic community.

The 2026 Barel Travel Scholarship recipients:

Amir Mano
Neurobiology, Biophysics & Biochemistry | Advisor: Yaniv Assaf
Research: Naturalistic fMRI and Instrument-Specific Neural Synchronization in Musicians
Conference: OHBM 2026, France

Amit Silber
Electrical and Computer Engineering | Advisor: Wasim Huleihel
Research: Testing for a Hidden Geometry in Random Graphs
Conference: COLT 2026, San Diego, USA

Asaf Ben Arie
Department of Statistics and Operations Research | Advisor: Malka Gorfine
Research: Flexible Deep Neural Networks for Partially Linear Survival Data: Estimation and Survival Inference
Conference: International Biometric Conference (IBC) 2026, South Korea

Bar Alon
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Lior Wolf
Research: Mitigating the Faithfulness Gap in Textual Explanations of LLM Decisions via Attribution Guidance
Conference: ACL 2026, San Diego, USA

Ella Baumer
Shmunis School for Biomedical Research | Advisor: Tal Pupko
Research: Adaptive Phylogenetic Tree Search via Machine Learning-Based Parameter Selection
Conference: Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (SMBE) 2026, Denmark

Erik Lager
Statistics and Operations Research | Advisor: Amit Moscovich
Research: Quantifying the Noise Sensitivity of the Wasserstein Metric for Images
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

Etai Sella
Electrical and Computer Engineering | Advisor: Or Patashnik
Research: LooseRoPE: Content-Aware Attention Manipulation for Semantic Harmonization; Prox-E: Fine-Grained 3D Shape Editing via Primitive-Based Abstractions
Conference: ACM SIGGRAPH 2026, Los Angeles, USA

Haneen Najjar
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisors: Mahmood Sharif & Eyal Ronen
Research: Sy-FAR: Symmetry-based Fair Adversarial Robustness
Conference: USENIX Security 2026, Baltimore, USA

Matan Schliserman
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Tomer Koren
Research: Flat Minima and Generalization: Insights from Stochastic Convex Optimization
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

May Hamri
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Inbal Talgam
Research: Zero-shot Budgeted Resource Allocation for LLM Orchestration
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

Or Shafran
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Mor Geva
Research:

1. From Directions to Regions: Decomposing Activations in Language Models via Local Geometry
2. Constructing Interpretable Features from Compositional Neuron Groups

Conferences: ACL 2026, San Diego, USA; ICML 2026, South Korea

Oran Ridel
Electrical and Computer Engineering | Advisor: Alon Peled
Research: Improved Bounds for Reward-Agnostic and Reward-Free Exploration
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

Orin Levy
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Yishay Mansour
Research:

1. Near-Optimal Regret for Policy Optimization in Contextual MDPs with General Offline Function Approximation
2. Optimal Regret for Policy Optimization in Contextual Bandits

Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

Ron Zadicario
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Advisor: Tova Milo
Research: Differentially Private Submodular Maximization with a Knapsack Constraint
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

Yehonatan Elisha
Industrial Engineering | Advisor: Noam Konigstein
Research: ConEx: Human-Interpretable Saliency Maps via Concept-Aware Attribution
Conference: ICML 2026, South Korea

We thank Dr. Monique Barel for her generous support of the scholarship program. Her contribution plays an important role in advancing AI and data science research at Tel Aviv University and in enabling young researchers to share their work with the international scientific community.

Congratulations to all awardees, and we wish them great success in their research and conference presentations.