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. She serves as academic advisor for PhD students at both Robotics Institute and Tepper School of Business.
Born in Greece, she went to the United States 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.
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.