Ekaterini Panagiotou Sycara, also known as Katia Sycara, is a Greek computer scientist and an Edward Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics in the Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.[1,10] She is internationally known for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in negotiation, autonomous agents, multi-agent systems, multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction, and the Semantic Web.[1,10] She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as an academic advisor for PhD students at both the Robotics Institute and the Tepper School of Business.[9,8] An AAAI Fellow, Sycara earned a BS from Brown University, an MS from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and completed her PhD in 1987 at the Georgia Institute of Technology under Janet L. Kolodner with the dissertation "Resolving Adversarial Conflicts: An approach integrating case-based and analytic methods" (OCLC 17660810).
Early life and education
Born in Greece, she went to the United States to pursue advanced education through various scholarships, including a Fulbright (1965-1969). She received a B.S. in applied mathematics from Brown University, an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and a PhD in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.[3]
Research and career
Sycara is a pioneer in the field of the semantic web, case-based reasoning, autonomous agents, and multi-agent systems.[1,10] She has authored or co-authored more than 700 technical papers dealing with multi-agent systems, software agents, web services, semantic web, human–computer interaction, human-robot interaction, negotiation, case-based reasoning, and the application of these techniques to crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing, healthcare management, financial planning, and e-commerce. She has also led multimillion-dollar research efforts funded by DARPA, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, AFRL, NSF, and industry.
Through an ONR MURI program and the COABS DARPA program, Sycara's group developed the RETSINA multiagent infrastructure, a toolkit that enables the development of heterogeneous software agents that can dynamically coordinate in open information environments such as 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. Additionally, 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.
Academic service
Sycara is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Series on Agents, and the Area Editor of AI and Management Science for the journal "Group Decision and Negotiation." She is a member of the editorial board for the Kluwer book series on "Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations" and the journals "Agent Oriented Software Engineering", "Web Intelligence and Agent Technologies", "Journal of Infonomics", "Fundamenda Informaticae", "Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications", and the "ETAI journal on the Semantic Web" (1998–2001). She also served on the editorial boards of "IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications" (1992–1996) and "AI in Engineering" (1990–1996).
Sycara served on the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom from 2003 to 2009 and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the Greek National Research Center Demokritos from 2004 to 2012. She was a member of the AAAI Executive Council (1996–1999), a member of the OASIS Technical committee on the development of the UDDI (Universal Description and Discovery for Interoperability) software standard, and an invited expert for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Working Group on Web Services Architecture. She was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems (IFMAS) and a founding member of the Semantic Web Science Association. Additionally, Sycara served as program chair of the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), general chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 98), chair of the Steering Committee of the Agents Conference (1999–2001), scholarship chair of AAAI (1993–1999), and US co-chair for the US-Europe Semantic Web Services Initiative.
Awards and honors
Sycara is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean in 2004 and received the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2005. Sycara is the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She is also the recipient of the 2015 Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN) Award of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) GDN Section for her outstanding contributions to the field of group decision and negotiation. According to the citation of the award, "Katia Sycara is widely acknowledged as one of the leading researchers in the field of autonomous software agents and in particular on problems related to joint decision making and negotiations of such agents. Her work is characterized by a unique combination of methods from Artificial Intelligence and research on human negotiations, and thus has contributed to significant advances in both fields."
Sycara's robot teams have won multiple international awards. In the 2005 Robocup Urban Search and Rescue (US Open) held in Atlanta, her team won the First-in-Class Award for Autonomy and the First-in-Class Award for Mobility. Two years later, again in Atlanta, she led another team that became world champions in the 2007 International Robocup Search and Rescue Simulation League Competition. In 2008, her robotic team placed third in the Worldwide Robocup Championship Competition in the Urban Search and Rescue Virtual robots League held in Beijing, China.