Katia Sycara

Katia Sycara is a Research Professor in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She serves as the Sixth Century Chair (part time) in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. She directs the Intelligent Software Agents Lab at Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Born in Greece, she went to U.S. to pursue advanced education through various scholarships, including a Fulbright. She received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean in 2004.

Research
Prof. Sycara is a pioneer in the field of Semantic Web, Case-based reasoning, Autonomous agents and Multi-agent systems. She has authored or co-authored more than 300 technical papers dealing with Multi-agent systems, Software Agents, Agents Supporting Human Teams, Multi-Agent Learning in Cooperative and Adversarial Environments, Web Services, the Semantic Web, Human-Agent Interaction, Negotiation, Case-Based Reasoning and the application of these techniques to crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing and financial planning and e-commerce. She has led multi-million dollar research effort funded by DARPA, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, AFRL, NSF and industry. Through an ONR MURI program and though the COABS DARPA program, Prof. Sycara's group has developed the RETSINA multiagent infrastructure, a toolkit that enables the development of heterogeneous software agents that can dynamically coordinate in open information environments (e.g. the Internet). RETSINA has been used in multiple applications including supporting human joint mission teams for crisis response; creating autonomous agents for situation awareness and information fusion; financial portfolio management, negotiations and coalition formation for e-commerce, and coordinating robots for Urban Search and Rescue. Prof. Sycara is one of the contributors to the development of OWL-S, the Darpa-sponsored language for Semantic Web services, as well as matchmaking and brokering software for agent discovery, service integration and semantic interoperation.

Professional Activities
Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

Fellow, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

Recipient, 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award

Recipient, Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005

Member, Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom

Member, Scientific Advisory Board of the Greek National Center of Scientific Research "Demokritos" Information Technology Division

Program Chair, The Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003)

General Chair, The Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 98)

Chair, The Steering Committee of the Agents Conference (1999-2001)

Scholarship chair, AAAI (1993-1999)

Member, AAAI Executive Council (1996-99)

Invited Expert, W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) Working Group on Web Services Architecture

Member, OASIS Technical committee on the development of UDDI (Universal Description and Discovery for Interoperability) software which is an industry standard

Founding member and member, the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems (IFMAS)

Founding member, the Semantic Web Science Association

US co-chair, the US-Europe Semantic Web Services Initiative

Founding Editor-in-Chief, the journal "Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems"

Editor-in-Chief, the Springer Series on Agents

Member of the Editorial Board, the Kluwer book series on "Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations"

Area Editor of AI and Management Science, the journal "Group Decision and Negotiation"

Member of the editorial board, the journals "Agent Oriented Software Engineering", "Web Intelligence and Agent Technologies", "Journal of Infonomics", "Fundamenda Informaticae", and "Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications"

Member of the editorial board of the "ETAI journal on the Semantic Web" (1998-2001), on the Editorial Board of "IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications" (1992-1996), and "AI in Engineering" (1990-1996).