Autonomous Agents Research Award:
ACM SIGART (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence), in collaboration with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, instituted an annual award in 2001 for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. The award is intended to recognize researchers whose current work is an important influence on the field – whether robots, software agents or any other system that can sense its environment and act on that information in pursuit of its own goals. The award is an official ACM award, funded by an endowment created by ACM SIGART from the proceeds of previous Autonomous Agents conferences.

• Manuela Veloso, 2009
  ..she has made significant and sustained contributions to Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in the areas of planning and control learning in multi-agent systems. Prof. Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of teams of robot agents where cognition, perception, and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution, and learning tasks. She has made significant contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, planning by analogical reuse, and more recently, robot learning from demonstration. Her research contributions have also been realized concretely in the form of teams of robot soccer playing agents that have won several international championships at the annual RoboCup robot soccer competitions. Her impact and visibility has been consistently high over the past two decades for her technical contributions, for her impressive robot teams, and for her leadership within the research community.
  SCS Release, Carnegie Mellon Release

• Katia Sycara, 2002
  ...she has made significant contributions to a number of subareas of agent research, including agent architectures, middle agents, and multi-agent negotiation. She has played a major role in organizing the Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and the International Conferences on Autonomous Agents.

• Tuomas Sandholm, 2001 (Inaugural Award)
  ...he has conducted an intensive research program in electronic markets and multi-agent systems, and has also done work in other areas of autonomous agents. The breadth and depth of his contributions over a relatively short period of time are impressive. In addition, he has been an active contributor to the Autonomous Agents community, contributing regularly to the AA conference since its inception.

• Milind Tambe, 2005 (PHD CS) [USC]
  ...he has made significant and sustained contributions to the research on autonomous agents and multi agent systems. In particular, Dr. Tambe made seminal contributions to the theory, applications, and software infrastructure in the area of teamwork, which has become a flourishing research area in multi agent systems. In addition to his substantial research contributions, Dr. Tambe has served the autonomous agents research community, in a variety of ways...