Research

I direct the Intelligent Agents Lab at UCF. My research is in the area of activity and plan recognition; my Ph.D. thesis was on multi-agent plan recognition and focused on the problem of recognizing tactical team plans from spatio-temporal traces of military teams in urban settings. I am lead editor of a book (Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition: Theory and Practice) on this topic. My work on activity recognition has focused primarily on the following domains:

My area of expertise is AI and machine learning, primarily in the context of multi-agent and multi-robot systems. For a synopsis of my group's work, please check out my UCF faculty showcase profile or the summary of my work on Data-Driven Social Informatics (long version). For my work on robotics check out this talk at the NSF Robot Learning workshop. To find out about me and other women STEM faculty at UCF, check out this interview. I was also interviewed for an overview on AI by the Florida High Tech magazine.

Graduate research applicants to my group should have prior experience in one of the following areas: multi-agent systems, machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, social media analysis, games/simulations, or robotics.

Awards and Recognitions

Teaching

Office Hours (Fall 2023-Spring 2024)

Service

Biography

I joined the faculty of computer science at University of Central Florida, Orlando in fall 2007. I received my Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, an M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon, and an A.B. in psychology from Princeton University. Between my masters and Ph.D., I worked as a researcher at Compaq Research/HP Labs (CRL) in the handheld computing group. Outside of work, I practice martial arts and have a shodan (1st degree black belt) in Shotokan Karate. I also have an advanced PADI diver certification and have recently completed my 270th dive. My husband (and diving buddy), Dr. Rahul Sukthankar, is a researcher in computer vision at Google Research.

Contact

Dr. Gita Sukthankar
University of Central Florida
Department of Computer Science
Mail: 4000 Central Florida Blvd
Orlando, FL, 32816-2362
Physical: 4328 Scorpius St.
Orlando, FL, 32816-2362
Tel: 407-823-4305
Dept Fax: 407-823-5835
Email: gitars at eecs.ucf.edu