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Sarit Kraus (שרית קראוס‎; born 1960) is a professor of computer science at the Bar-Ilan University in Israel and an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. Born in Jerusalem, Israel, married to Prof. Yitzchak Kraus and has five children. She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Hebrew University in 1989 under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Lehmann.

Kraus’s 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 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’s work, others have begun to develop automated agents that negotiate with people. Consequently, Kraus’s 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.

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 including the formation of coalitions. This view differed radically from the fully cooperative agents approach, commonly held then by the multi-agent community (then called Distributed Artificial Intelligence). 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).

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). Within the mainstream logic community, “KLM” semantics have had probably the greatest impact. According to her DBLP entry Kraus has 131 collaborators from all around the world and from different disciplines. She is the author of a monograph on negotiations and co-author of additional two books.

Awards

 * 1995 IJCAI-95 Computers and Thought Award. The award is given by the IJCAI organization every two years to an ”outstanding young scientist"
 * 2002 AAAI Fellow
 * 2007 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. The award is given by ACM SIGART, in collaboration with IFAAMAS, for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents
 * 2007 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award with Barbara Grosz (joint winner)
 * 2008 ECCAI Fellow
 * 2009 Special commendations from the city of Los Angeles for the creation of the ARMOR security scheduling system
 * 2010 “Women of the year” of Emuna
 * 2010 EMET prize