About
Since Fall 2019, Anita Raja is a Professor of Computer Science at Hunter College and is a member of the doctoral faculty in Computer Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Programs and Professor of Computer Science in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering at The Cooper Union from 2014-2019. Prior to joining Cooper Union, she was an Associate Professor of Software and Information Systems at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Anita received a B.S. Honors in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics summa cum laude from Temple University, Philadelphia in 1996, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1998 and 2003 respectively.
At Cooper, Professor Raja oversaw the graduate program, the study abroad program, the premed track and facilitates research activities of faculty and students in the Engineering School. She also directs the Distributed Intelligent Agents Lab. The lab consists of a team of undergraduate and graduate engineers doing research in artificial intelligence, multiagent systems and machine learning. Professor Raja also serves as a research mentor to several high school students from NewYork and New Jersey high schools. She has taught courses in Blockchain and AI, Software Agent Systems, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Network-based and Web-based Application Development, Advanced Object Oriented Design and Implementation, Physics Simulations and Engineering Design and Problem Solving.
Professor Raja's research contribution is in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in the study of decentralized control and reasoning in software agent systems operating in the context of uncertainty and limited computational resources. Current projects include advanced machine learning methods for prediction of preterm birth and optimizing route choice in traffic networks. Along with her students, she studies the role of bounded rationality and meta-cognition in complex agent systems while leveraging decision-theoretic mechanisms, distributed constraint optimization, statistical physics, bayesian statistics and multiagent learning for agent control. Her work is supported by grants from NSF, ONR, DARPA and DHS and has been published in highly ranked journals and conferences including JAAMAS, AIJ, AAMAS, AAAI, WIAS, IAT and PMLR.
Past applications include tornado tracking, major defense acquisition programs, situational awareness in social media, medical informatics, e-government and public policy decision making, predictive and visual analytics for intelligence analysis, task allocation problems, intelligent information gathering and smart home technologies.
Raja has co-chaired several workshops on Metareasoning at AAAI and AAMAS and served on program committees of many AI-related conferences and workshops. She is co-editor of the MIT Press book titled Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking and co-author of Cognitive Science: An Interactive Approach published by NSS Press. She is recipient of the 2006 UNCC College of Computing Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty research award and Best Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE Intelligent Agent Technology Conference. While at UNCC, Professor Raja was PI and Project Director of the DOE-funded GAANN Program for Computing and Informatics. She was also affiliated with the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University. In 2019, Crain's New York Business named Professor Raja as one of 75 "Notable Women in Tech" in the Greater New York City area.