Email: anita.raja@hunter.cuny.edu
Office: 695 Park Avenue, Hunter North Building, NY, NY 10065
Anita Raja is Acting Chair and Professor of Computer Science at Hunter College and a member of the doctoral faculty in Computer Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was formerly 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 and an Associate Professor of Software and Information Systems at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte from 2003-2014. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of bounded rationality, distributed problem-solving, and artificial intelligence. She has made significant contributions in the design and control of rational agents interacting in real-time, multi-agent environments operating in the context of uncertainty and limited computational resources.
Raja directs the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Lab. Her work is supported by grants from NSF, NIH, ONR, DARPA, DHS and PNNL. She is a co-investigator at the Civic-Led Urban Adaptation Research Center (CIVIC-UARC), an initiative at the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. She is recipient of the 2006 UNCC College of Computing Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty research award, the Best Paper Award at the 2010 IEEE Intelligent Agent Technology Conference and a 2021 National Institutes of Health’s Decoding Maternal Morbidity Challenge prize for presenting a new methodology that identified patients with a high risk of preeclampsia early in pregnancy. Crain’s New York Business named her as one of 75 “Notable Women in Tech” in the Greater New York City area in 2019. She was elected to serve as a member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 2022. She is a senior member of AAAI and a 2024 TEDxCUNY speaker.
Raja received a B.S. Honors in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa 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.