Peter Beling
Current University
University of Virginia
Research Area
Systems engineering and AI, including AI verification and validation, reinforcement learning, and transfer learning; engineering and testing cyber resilience; and prognostic and diagnostic systems.
Research Summary
Beling develops principled methodologies for engineering intelligent systems. The central thesis of this work is that AI should be viewed as a system rather than a problem-solving technique.
Background
Peter A. Beling is a professor in the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia (UVA). His work focuses on resilient, mission-aligned AI, with broader interests in cyber resilience and trusted systems. At the intersection of systems theory and artificial intelligence, Beling studies large language models, reinforcement learning, and the co-design of algorithms with the systems in which they operate. His research supports a range of national security applications, including mission engineering, test and evaluation, and predictive maintenance. Beling is an affiliate of UVA’s National Security Data and Policy Institute and the Virginia Tech National Security Institute.
From 2021 to 2025, Beling was on the faculty of Virginia Tech, where he served as Director of the Intelligent Systems Division at the National Security Institute and as a professor in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. During this period, he also contributed to the Research Council of the Systems Engineering Research Center (SERC), a Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). From 1993 to 2021, Dr. Beling held a series of roles at UVA, including Professor of Systems Engineering; Director of the UVA site of the Center for Visual and Decision Informatics, a National Science Foundation Industry–University Cooperative Research Center; and Director of the Adaptive Decision Systems Laboratory.
Alma Mater
Beling holds a Ph.D. in operations research from the University of California, Berkeley; an M.S. in operations research from The George Washington University; and a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Virginia.