Sycara is a pioneer in the field of semantic web, case-based reasoning, autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. She has authored or co-authored more than 700 technical papers dealing with multi-agent systems, software agents, web services, semantic web, human–computer interaction, human-robot interaction, negotiation, case-based reasoning and the application of these techniques to crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing, healthcare management, financial planning and e-commerce. She has led multimillion-dollar research effort funded by DARPA, NASA, AFOSR, ONR, AFRL, NSF and industry. Through an ONR MURI program and though the COABS DARPA program, Prof. Sycara's group has developed the RETSINA multiagent infrastructure, a toolkit that enables the development of heterogeneous software agents that can dynamically coordinate in open information environments. RETSINA has been used in multiple applications including supporting human joint mission teams for crisis response; creating autonomous agents for situation awareness and information fusion; financial portfolio management, negotiations and coalition formation for e-commerce, and coordinating robots for Urban Search and Rescue. Sycara is one of the contributors to the development of OWL-S, the Darpa-sponsored language for Semantic Web services, as well as matchmaking and brokering software for agent discovery, service integration and semantic interoperation.
Academic service
Sycara is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems; Editor-in-Chief, of the Springer Series on Agents; and Area Editor of AI and Management Science, the journal "Group Decision and Negotiation." She is a member of the Editorial Board, the Kluwer book series on "Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations"; member of the editorial board, the journals "Agent Oriented Software Engineering", "Web Intelligence and Agent Technologies", "Journal of Infonomics", "Fundamenda Informaticae", and "Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications"; and member of the editorial board of the "ETAI journal on the Semantic Web". She was on the Editorial Board of "IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications", and "AI in Engineering". She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, 2003-2009; member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of the Greek National Research Center Demokritos, 2004-2012; member of the AAAI Executive Council ; member of the OASIS Technical committee on the development of UDDI software which is an industry standard; and an invited expert for W3C Working Group on Web Services Architecture. She was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems, and founding member of the Semantic Web Science Association. Sycara served as the program chair of the Second International Semantic Web Conference ; general chair, of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents ; chair of the Steering Committee of the Agents Conference ; scholarship chair of AAAI ; and the US co-chair for the US-Europe Semantic Web Services Initiative.
Awards and honors
Sycara is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a Fellow of American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Sycara is the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She is also the recipient of the 2015 Group Decision and Negotiation Award of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences GDN Section for her outstanding contributions to the field of group decision and negotiation. According to the citation of the award: Sycara's robot teams have won multiple international awards. In the 2005 Robocup Urban Search and Rescue held in Atlanta, her team won the First-in-Class Award for Autonomy, and the First-in-Class Award for Mobility. Two years later, again in Atlanta, she led another team that became a world champions in the 2007 International Robocup Search and Rescue Simulation League Competition. In 2008, her robotic team placed third in the Worldwide Robocup Championship Competition in the Urban Search and Rescue Virtual robots League held in Beijing, China. In 2005, she received the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean in 2004.
