Maria Gini is a College of Science & Engineering Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. She works on decentralized decision-making for autonomous agents in many application domains, ranging from swarm robotics to task allocation, methods to explore unknown environments, and navigation in dense crowds. She is a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, and IEEE and won numerous awards for teaching, mentoring, increasing participation of women and underrepresented members in computing, and for service. She has published extensively in journals, conferences, and books. She is Editor in Chief of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and is on the editorial board of other journals, including Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.