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Laudatio when obtaining Emet price 2010
Prof. Kraus’ fundamental and broad research has distinguished her as a leading, world
class researcher and one of the most influential individuals, and women scientists in
computer science in Israel. Her groundbreaking research in multiple areas of Artificial
Intelligence has created whole new research fields, and laid the foundations to
countless other research.
In my humble opinion, Prof. Kraus is clearly the most
influential Artificial Intelligence researcher in Israel, and can take credit for much of
Israel’s distinguished world standing in this area.
Kraus’ research has made highly influential contributions to numerous subfields, most
notably to multiagent systems and non-monotonic reasoning. One of her important
contributions is to strategic negotiation. Her pioneering work in this area is one of the
first to integrate Game Theory with Artificial Intelligence.
Furthermore, she started new
research on automated agents that negotiate with people, and established that these
agents must be evaluated via experiments with humans. In particular, she has
developed Diplomat, the first automated agent that negotiated proficiently with people.
This was followed with other agents that bargain well with people by integrating
qualitative decision-making approach with machine learning tools, to face the challenge
of people being bounded rational.
Based on Kraus’ work, others have begun to develop
automated agents that negotiate with people. Consequently, Kraus’s seminal work has
become the gold standard for research in negotiation, both among automated agents
and between agents and humans. This work has provoked the curiosity of other
communities and was published in journals of political science, psychology and
economics.
Currently, Kraus focuses on a multidisciplinary project Dynamic Models of
the Effect of Culture on Collaboration and Negotiation. For this project, she built a
bargainer agent that collects data on culture differences in negotiations. It has
negotiated with almost 100 people in Lebanon and a similar number in Harvard U., and
all believed that they played with a person, not recognizing that this was an agent. Two
additional exciting projects are for building systems that negotiate and argue proficiently
with people.
Kraus is in the process of building a system for the Israeli police for training
law enforcement officials to interview witnesses and suspects. The goal is to develop
automated agents that can play the roles of the interviewee (the suspect) and also an
agent that will be able to play the role of the interviewer (the law enforcement official).
The second project is in cooperation with the Sheba hospital for building virtual
coaching agent.
Kraus’s work consistently reflects an extraordinary combination of rigorous problem
formulation and sound mathematics. She was the first to develop computational models
of coalition formation and has shown that the problem of task allocation among
autonomous agents can be modeled in a coalition formation, discussing a variety of
settings and presented both theoretical complexity results and heuristics approaches to
overcome the complexity challenges. This resulted in much subsequent work by others
(e.g., Vig and Adams, 2005 carried extensive experiments studying the deployment of
our algorithm for multi-robots settings).
Recently, Kraus has opened a new direction to
formally handle the high complexity of coalition problems by studying them as a function
of their distinct input elements using the theory of parameterized complexity. This has
already raised a lot of interest from young researchers.
Another influential contribution of Kraus is in introducing a dimension of individualism
into the multi-agent field by developing protocols and strategies for cooperation among
self-interested agents. This view differed radically from the fully cooperative agents
approach, commonly held then by the multi -agent community (then called Distributed
Artificial Intelligent). Individualism is necessary for reliably constraining the behaviour in
open environments, such as electronic marketplaces.
Together with Grosz of Harvard, Kraus developed a reference theory for collaborative
planning (a TeamWork model) called SharedPlans, which provides specification for the
design of collaboration-capable agents and a framework for identifying and investigating
fundamental questions about collaboration. It specifies the minimal conditions for a
group of agents to have a joint goal, the group and individual decision making
procedures that are required, the way the agents' mental states and plans can evolve
over time and other various important relationships among the agents, e.g., teammates,
subcontractors, etc. Given the extensiveness of SharedPlans and its rigorous
specifications, it has been the basis for many other works and was widely adopted in
other fields (e.g. robotics or human-machine interaction). For example, Oliviero Stock,
one of the leaders of AI in Europe, used SharedPlans as a basis for multimodal
dialogues.
Kraus is also highly recognized for her contribution to the area of Non-Monotonic
Reasoning. She is the first author of one of the most influential papers in the area
(KLM). This paper [ S. Kraus, D. Lehmann and M. Magidor. Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Preferential Models and Cumulative Logics, Artificial Intelligence, 44:167--207, 1990.], with more than 1120 citations, represents one of the four main
approaches in non-monotonic reasoning.
Within the mainstream logic community,
“KLM” semantics have had probably the greatest impact. Many researchers have built
on this work and developed many tools around it (e.g. the “KLMLean” theorem prover).
For example, Joe Halpern, the well known researcher on knowledge and uncertainty, in
his 1996 JACM paper with Friedman introduced a new approach to modeling
uncertainty based on plausibility measures basing his model on the KLM axioms.
Furthermore, KLM became a standard of reference for studying which properties are
satisfied by other reasoning systems.
Kraus’s elegant solutions have enriched the research community, but they have also
had practical fruits as well. They have led to the design and construction of real
systems, moving concepts out of academia and into the real world. Recently, Kraus
together with Tambe and Ordonez from USC, developed an innovative approach of
randomized policies for security applications when resources are limited. The innovative
algorithm, which applies game theory and optimization methods, improves the state of
the art in security of robotics and multi-agent systems, and is used in practice by the
Los Angeles international airport. Similarly, her seminal work in the area of formal
models of collaboration is used in industrial cutting edge simulation technology and
team supported tools.
Over the years, Kraus has published 77 journal papers, 21 of them in Artificial
Intelligence Journal, which is one of the longest established and most prestigious
journals in AI. In fact, she holds the world record in number of articles in AI Journal.
She
is the author of a monograph on negotiations and co-authored an additional three books
(see attached CV). She has also written 35 book chapters, 106 highly refereed
conference papers, and 46 Refereed Workshops, Posters and Short papers. Kraus hindex
is 39 and her g-index 87. She is ranked 24 world-wide on the Academic Search
authors list in Artificial Intelligence. Over the past 20 years she has received numerous
grants from various funding agencies and companies, including the NSF, EC, ISF,
MOS, Ministry of Trade, United States Institute of Peace, GIF, MAFAT, BSF, DARPA,
and GM. She has also served as associate editor of Annals of Mathematics and
Artificial Intelligence and on the editorial and advisory boards of several other
prestigious journals.
Kraus is also very active in organizing international conferences
and workshops in the field of AI and a strong supporter of local conferences as a means
for getting young Israeli researchers closer to the key people in the AI community,
Kraus has put many efforts in inspiring young researchers. She has advised 6 postdocs,
16 PhD students and 43 master students. Currently she is supervising 7 PhD students
and 4 MSc students. Seven of her PhD students are faculty members in universities and
colleges in Israel and seven are research scientists in high tech companies and
research centers in Israel and the USA.
Kraus is also known for her leadership in efforts
to increase the participation of women in science.
Under her numerous international collaborations, she counts researchers from all
around the world and from different disciplines, including Prof. Selten from Bonn, Prof.
Grosz from Harvard, Prof. Shoham from Stanford, Prof. Korf from UCLA, Prof. Michele
Gelfand from the Dept. of Psychology in UMD, the mathematician, Prof. Magidor, former
president of HU, Dr. Katia Sycara from CMU, Prof. Ito from Nagoya Institute of
Technology, Prof Jennings from Southampton University and Prof. Jon Wilkenfeld from
the department of Government and Politics at UMD.
Kraus’s highly cited paper on SharedPlans (848 citations) was recognized by the
European Coordinating Committee for AI (ECCAI) as one of the most influential
developments in AI over the last decade, and led to several prizes and honors, including
the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems' prestigious
"Influential Paper Prize" in 2007. In 1995, she received the IJCAI “Computers and
Thought Award” for outstanding young scientists in AI; and in 2007 the ACM/SIGART
Agents award, the most important award in Multi-agents systems research. In
recognition of the non-monotonic reasoning work, she received in 2009, together with
Tambe, Ordonez and their USC students, a special commendation from the city of Los
Angeles. She was honored as fellow of AAAI and ECCAI. Kraus has received with
Grosz the 2007 “IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award”, and has received six “best paper”
awards.
One beautiful aspects of Kraus’s research is that it provides as much insight into human
processes as the artificial. For example, Kraus helped develop Colored Trails, a publicly
available program that provides a platform for researchers to conduct decision-making
studies. While such work involves core problems in computer science, she draws on
fields as diverse as economics, philosophy and psychology to study frequent, but
complex real life situations.
On the personal level, I would also like to mention that Prof. Kraus is a strong believer in
people. She is very active in promoting students with learning disabilities and students
from low income families and minorities. She herself has adopted, seven years ago, two
young kids (with the strong support of her grown up kids).
In summary, through her influential research and selfless service to the field, Sarit Kraus has been an inspiration—and her work has been influential in the research trajectories of many AI researchers. She richly deserves this honor.
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