Goldsmith has been active in the AI community since 1996, and has published heavily cited and award winning papers, including The First Annual IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize, Honorable Mention, 2003, for ``The Computational Complexity of Probabilistic Plan Existence and Evaluation," Journal of AI Research, 1998, and honors for student papers she coauthored at FLAIRS '12 and CGAMES '13. Her research areas include many aspects of decision making, including decision making under uncertainty; computational social choice; preference elicitation, representation, and aggregation; computational learning theory; multi-criteria optimization, and computational complexity. She has published numerous articles in the leading AI conferences (e.g., AAMAS, AAAI, AIPS, FLAIRS, IJCAI, ICML, ISAIM, NIPS, and UAI) and journals (e.g., AIJ, AIM, IJAR , JAIR, JACM, JMLR, and TIIS). She was recognized in 2014 as a Senior Member of AAAI, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. She was elected in 2019 to the AAAI Executive Council, and served one term. She is currently actively involved at the Department, COllege, and national level in project related to teaching about AI.
In 2015, Goldsmith received an Undergraduate Research Mentor award from the Computing Research Association. She has received teaching awards at the department, college, and university level at the University of Kentucky. In 1998, Goldsmith was recognized by the AAAS for her mentoring of members of underrepresented groups in the STEM disciplines. She has helped organize and/or participated in several conferences for women in computing, as well as multiple doctoral consortia at AI conferences.
Goldsmith has taught classes in recent years on artificial intelligence, theory of computing, discrete math and logic, comparative decision making studies, and "science fiction and computer ethics", and the textbook, Computer and Technology Ethics: Engaging Through Science Fiction, by Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, Nicholas Mattei, Cory Siler, and Sara-Jo Swiatek, came out in February 2023 from MIT Press.
Goldsmith was on the editorial board of JAIR from 2008 for some years, and on the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence since 2015, and was an associate editor. She has co-edited special issues of Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence ('14 and in process), International Journal on Approximate Reasoning, and AI Magazine ('08).
She has been a senior program committee (PC) member for both IJCAI and AAAI and an Area Chair for AAAI ('22 -- 24). She has been on numerous AAAI, UAI, and ICAPS PCs, helped organize multiple MPREF (Multi-disciplinary Preference Handling) Workshops, UAI Workshops on Bayesian Applications, and has co-organized doctoral consortia (DCs) at ICAPS '08 and IJCAI '11, and has been on DC PCs for other AI conferences, including AAMAS and AISTATS. She has been involved in the interdisciplinary conference, Algorithmic Decision Theory, and was conference chair for Algorthmic Decision Theory '15, which was held in Lexington, KY.
She has served on multiple NSF panels, and reviewed proposals for national funding agencies for many other countries.