Sarit Kraus (Hebrew: שרית קראוס; born 1960 in Jerusalem, Israel) is a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Daniel Lehmann, focusing her research on multiagent systems and non-monotonic reasoning. She was named the 2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer in recognition of her contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multiagent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and non-monotonic reasoning, as well as her leadership in these fields. Her additional honors include the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1995 and being named an ACM Fellow in 2014, and she is associated with Yitzchak Kraus.

Sarit Kraus was born in Jerusalem, Israel. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Hebrew University in 1989 under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Lehmann. She is married to Prof. Yitzchak Kraus and has five children.^[1]

Kraus has made highly influential contributions to numerous subfields, most notably to multiagent systems (including people and robots) and non-monotonic reasoning. One of her important contributions is to strategic negotiation, with her work in this area being among the first to integrate game theory with artificial intelligence.^[2] Furthermore, she initiated new research on automated agents that negotiate with people and established that these agents must be evaluated via experiments with humans. In particular, she developed Diplomat, the first automated agent that negotiated proficiently with people.^[3] This was followed by other agents that interact well with people by integrating qualitative decision-making approaches with machine learning tools to address the challenge of human bounded rationality.^[4] Based on Kraus's work, others have begun developing automated agents that negotiate and interact with people, establishing her research as the gold standard for negotiation research both among automated agents and between agents and humans. This work has provoked interest across other communities and has been published in journals of political science, psychology, and economics.^[5,6]

Another influential contribution of Kraus is introducing individualism into the multi-agent field by developing protocols and strategies for cooperation among self-interested agents, including coalition formation. This view differed radically from the fully cooperative agents approach commonly held at the time by the multi-agent community (then known as Distributed Artificial Intelligence), with individualism being necessary to reliably constrain behavior in open environments such as electronic marketplaces. Together with Barbara J. Grosz of Harvard, Kraus developed SharedPlans, a reference theory for collaborative planning (a TeamWork model) that provides specifications for designing collaboration-capable agents and a framework for investigating fundamental questions about collaboration. SharedPlans specifies minimal conditions for a group of agents to have a joint goal, the required group and individual decision-making procedures, how agents' mental states and plans evolve over time, and various relationships among agents such as teammates and subcontractors; given its extensiveness and rigorous specifications, it has served as the basis for many other works and has been widely adopted in fields such as robotics and human-machine interaction.^[7]

Kraus is also highly recognized for her contributions to the area of non-monotonic reasoning, serving as the first author of one of the field's most influential papers (KLM). Within the mainstream logic community, "KLM" semantics have had probably the greatest impact. According to her DBLP entry, Kraus has 131 collaborators from across the world and various disciplines, and she is the author of a monograph on negotiations as well as the co-author of two additional books.^{[8,10,11,12,9]}

Kraus's solutions have enriched the research community while also bearing practical fruits through the design and construction of real-world systems that transform academic concepts into reality. Together with Tambe and Ordonez from USC, she developed an innovative approach of randomized policies for security applications combining game theory and optimization methods, which improves state-of-the-art security in robotics and multi-agent systems and has been used in practice at the Los Angeles International Airport since 2007. Her seminal research in formal models of collaboration is utilized in cutting-edge industrial simulation technology and team-supported tools. Her work in developing Sheba's virtual speech therapist is currently used for treatment by several Israeli HMOs. The Colored Trails game environment she developed with Grosz provides a platform for decision-making studies, used extensively by researchers across dozens of universities and for training astronauts.

Kraus's recent projects include systems that negotiate and argue proficiently with people; her research on culture-sensitive agents resulted in numerous agents for cross-culture collaboration that have successfully interacted with hundreds of people in America, the Far East, and the Middle East who believed they were interacting with a human rather than an agent. Her work on virtual humans led to a system for the Israeli police to train law enforcement officials in interviewing witnesses and suspects, using virtual psychological models of suspects to produce diversified answers. She has also developed an intelligent agent that supports an operator working with a team of low-cost autonomous robots. Finally, together with the Israeli GM center, a persuasion system was developed to generate advice for drivers facing decisions involving conflicting goals.

In 1995, she received the IJCAI-95 Computers and Thought Award, which is given by the IJCAI organization every two years to an "outstanding young scientist". She became an AAAI Fellow in 2002 and an ECCAI Fellow in 2008. In 2007, she received the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, given by ACM SIGART in collaboration with IFAAMAS for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents, and was a joint winner of the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award with Barbara Grosz. In 2009, she received special commendations from the city of Los Angeles for the creation of the ARMOR security scheduling system.

In 2010, she was named "Women of the year" of Emuna and received the EMET prize. She was elected to Academia Europaea in 2012. In 2014, she won the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award with Onn Shehory and was named an ACM Fellow "for contributions to artificial intelligence, including multi-agent systems, human-agent interaction and non-monotonic reasoning". She was selected as the 2020–2021 ACM Athena Lecturer in 2020 "for foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multi-agent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and non-monotonic reasoning, and exemplary service and leadership in these fields." In 2023, she received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence.

External links include material at Bar-Ilan University. They also include a TEDx talk given by Sarit Kraus on 6 July 2015.