Sarah Rajtmajer is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology and research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. Her research integrates machine learning, game theory and graph theory for applications to social phenomena.

Dr. Rajtmajer co-leads one arm of DARPA’s Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program, which seeks to develop and deploy AI to assign “confidence scores” to research claims published in the social and behavioral sciences literatures. Her team is developing synthetic prediction markets populated by algorithmic trader-bots to interpretably generate these scores.

Dr. Rajtmajer’s other research interests center around how information is shared and spread, as well as how it is manipulated and weaponized by adversaries. She studies how sharing is influenced by values like privacy, trust, and truth, and the trade-offs involved in managing related solutions.

Before joining the Penn State faculty, she served as a consultant to the Defense and Intelligence communities on scientific programs for national security, with specific focus on initiatives in big data and computational social science. Prior to her work in consulting, Dr. Rajtmajer was an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Applied Research Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at Penn State. Dr. Rajtmajer has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a BA in Mathematics from Columbia University.