Maja Matarić is an American computer scientist. She is the Chan Soon-Shiong Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, with courtesy appointments in Neuroscience and in Pediatrics, at the University of Southern California. She is a founding pioneer of the field of socially assistive robotics, and author of the book The Robotics Primer (MIT Press).
Biography
Early life and education Maja Matarić was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia. She immigrated to the United States in her teens, with her mother, Mirjana N. Matarić, who was an accomplished author and educator. Her father, an electrical engineer, passed away from cancer before they immigrated. Matarić received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987, with a minor in Psychology/Cognitive Science. She received a Master of Science in Computer Science and AI in 1990 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and AI in 1994, both from MIT. Her master's thesis was titled "A Model for Distributed Mobile Robot Environment Learning and Navigation" and her doctoral dissertation was titled "Interaction and Intelligent Behavior". Her master's and doctoral advisor was Prof. Rodney A. Brooks.
Career Matarić started her academic career as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University, where she founded her Interaction Lab. She moved to the University of Southern California (USC) in 1997. At USC, she was the founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (RASC), and the co-director of the USC Robotics Lab, in addition to continuing to grow her Interaction Lab. After obtaining tenure, Matarić also became actively involved in university leadership: she served as the elected president of the faculty and the Academic Senate (2006-2007), as the Vice Dean of Research in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (2006-2019), and then as the interim USC Vice President of Research (2019-2020). Matarić was a visiting faculty researcher at Google in 2022, and then spent her two-year sabbatical as a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind.
Organizations Matarić is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMACAD). She is a fellow of AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and IEEE. She was also the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1996) and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM, 2011), the ACM Athena Lecturer Award (2024), and the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Computing (2025), among others (see Awards section below).
Research Matarić has published extensively and is highly cited across the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.
Behavior-Based Control and Learning Beginning with her graduate work at MIT, Matarić made fundamental contributions to the understanding of autonomous robot cognition and interaction. For her master's degree, she was the first to demonstrate that behavior-based systems (BBS) could be endowed with representation and thus have the expressive power to plan and learn. Her well-known robot system, Toto, was the first behavior-based system to learn maps online and optimize its behavior. It is highly cited and remains one of the milestones in BBS.
Multi-Robot Coordination: Distributed Robot Teams and Swarms In her PhD work, Matarić was one of the first to work on decentralized, distributed algorithms for robot teams and robot swarms that leveraged scalable local control. She enabled a team of 20 physical robots to interact and cooperate on tasks such as coordinated exploration, foraging, organizing in formations, and homing. Prior to her PhD work, nearly all research in robotics was restricted to single robots or pairs. She made pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of multi-robot coordination by showing that complex behaviors could be composed of basis behaviors in a principled way, bringing rigor to the then nascent discipline of distributed robotics. Matarić's next major contributions came as a faculty member, and focused on distributed robotics, also called multi-robot coordination and learning. Her work provided the first formal analysis of existing multi-robot coordination approaches, elucidating formal and practical limitations, then addressed those limitations by contributing provably correct yet scalable task allocation algorithms for multi-robot control. Her research group developed efficient principled market-based strategies in physical real-world validated multi-robot systems performing a variety of tasks including object transport, area cleanup, and reconnaissance. Her group's work also demonstrated analytical methods for automatically generating minimalist multi-robot controllers with provable properties. Finally, Matarić's research lab, the Interaction Lab, demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally the viability of online real-time learning in distributed multi-robot systems. Her Interaction Lab developed algorithms for model learning within a team, learning by imitation, and learning through human-robot interaction. She was a pioneer and an established leader in multi-robot coordination, which is now a large and thriving area of robotics.
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