Kate Larson is an associate professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. She is affiliated with the AI group. She completed her Ph.D in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and her undergraduate degree was in mathematics from Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Professor Larson's research interests fall in the area of artificial intelligence with an emphasis on self-interested multiagent systems. The overarching theme of her research is strategic reasoning in computational settings. She is interested in understanding how ideas from game theory, mechanism design and microeconomics can be used to model and design systems for intelligent agents, as well as in studying the effect that computational limitations have on strategic behaviour, with the aim of reconciling some of the conflicts that arise between computational and game-theoretic constraints.

She has developed models of bounded-rationality which provide a foundation on which to analyse strategic behaviour of computationally-limited agents in different negotiation mechanisms. She has shown that many of the commonly used negotiation mechanisms promote undesirable strategic behaviour in computationally-limited agents, and is currently studying the problem of how to design mechanisms which explicitly take into account the computational constraints of agents. She is also interested in how strategic agents learn in different environments, as well as in modelling and analysing argumentation from a strategic perspective.

Applications of Professor Larson's work include electronic auction and market design, design and implementation of software agents for negotiation settings, and the use of economic methodologies in computational systems.