Anita Raja is a 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. 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.

She also directs the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Lab. The lab consists of a team of graduate and undergraduate students doing research in artificial intelligence, multiagent systems and machine learning. Professor Raja has also served as a research mentor to several high school students from New York and New Jersey high schools. She has taught courses on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Advanced Data Structures and Algorithms, Blockchain and AI, Software Agent Systems, , 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, DHS and NIH 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, a 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. 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. She is a member of the AAAI Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She also co-chaired the 2020 AAAI undergraduate outreach workshop on AI and Robotics which was hosted at Hunter College and the TAPIA workshop on Undergraduate Research. 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 also a senior member of AAAI.