Gita Sukthankar Associate Professor
She is Also:
Director of the Intelligent Agents Lab at UCF
I'm very excited about melding models of machine learning with human cognition to create proactive assistant agents and robots that can collaborate with humans in socially intelligent ways.
Research
Sukthankar’s research focuses on artificial intelligence and applied machine learning, specifically in the area of social intelligence. Her work aims to give computers higher-level cognitive functions traditionally associated with humans, including planning, decision-making and understanding and managing social interactions. One of her focus areas examines one of the most important aspects of these human abilities: the ability to understand and predict the actions of other humans in the environment, known as activity recognition.
Societal Impact
Because Sukthankar’s areas of expertise lie in AI and machine learning, her work has far-reaching impacts in a number of fields. One research project funded by Lockheed Martin, aimed at creating better training and simulation for its pilots, uses machine learning to assess a pilot’s competence in various areas. Another funded by DARPA studies behavior on social media platforms GitHub, Reddit and Twitter predicts future activity by studying past data. Sukthankar’s latest project, also funded by DARPA, studies the behavior of human teams in Minecraft with the goal of creating a software agent that has a computational theory of mind that can watch what the players are doing, understand what they’re doing, and eventually participate in group construction projects.
Graduate Students and Achievements
Sukthankar has graduated eleven Ph.D. students, including an assistant professor at the University of Delaware and others who have gone on to Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin and SoarTech.
Education
Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon
M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon
B.A. in Psychology from Princeton University
Featured Video
Courses She Teaches
CAP 5610 Machine Learning
EEL 4660 Robotics Systems
Laboratory
Intelligent Agents Lab at UCF
Discoveries/Publication Highlights
Two books edited by Dr. Sukthankar:
Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition Editors: Gita Sukthankar, Robert Goldman, Chris Geib, David Pynadath, Hung Bui. Morgan Kaufmann 2014.
Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds Editors: Kiran Lakkaraju, Gita Sukthankar, Rolf T. Wigand. Cambridge University Press 2018
Awards/Grants
St. George’s School John B. Diman Alumni Award (2017)
UCF Reach for the Stars (2015)
UCF Research Incentive Award (2013)
CECS Dean’s Research Professorship Award (2013)
UCF Faculty Excellence for Doctoral Mentoring (Engineering and Sciences) (2012)
CECS Distinguished Researcher (2011)
Charles N. Millican Faculty Fellow (2010, 2012)
NSF CAREER (2009)
AFOSR Young Investigator (2009)
ONR Summer Faculty Fellow (2008)