SoIT's News, Issue 1 2009
Alumni Profile: Professor Judy Kay, BSc Hons (74), MSc (78), PhD (99)
In 1970 Judy Kay enrolled in Electrical Engineering at the University of Sydney as one of only 10 women among approximately 400 first year students. Now, having recently been promoted, Judy is again in an elite group of women; one of two female Professors currently in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and the first female Professor in the School of IT.
Judy was first attracted to IT after attending a university summer school during her high school years. “I felt that computing was going to be important so I enrolled in Electrical Engineering. In second year I took my first computer science subject, taught by the very charismatic Arthur Sale.” That saw her move to computer science. Her undergraduate years also fired her passion for teaching. Judy began her academic career as a Senior Tutor in the Basser Department of Computer Science and has moved through her career by combining computer science education with her research in creating personalised teaching systems and in human-computer interaction.
Since then Judy has had an enviable career. She is widely recognised as an innovative educator and has worked with the School on many exciting initiatives, including the undergraduate mentoring program, three major changes to foundation programming teaching, and rather fittingly, was the co-ordinator of the first computer science summer school for high school students. This year the National Computer Science School is in its fourteenth year with an intake of 65 year eleven students from around the nation.
Judy’s research and teaching have always been integrated, one supporting and inspiring the other. “Over the years, my research has often been driven by teaching and recognition that huge improvements to learning could be possible with better technology”. Her early work was into CPU scheduling was inspired by overcrowding in labs while more recent research has encompassed areas such as pervasive computing, user modelling and artificial intelligence in education: “My work aims to create personalised systems that can be really useful and at the same time I want to build them so that people really control them. The key to this is to build a model of the user and make sure people can scrutinise that model and control the personalisation. When people can see a model of themselves, presented in a way they can understand, that is also a very powerful tool for reflection and improving learning”.
Judy has been the recipient of several major grants including collaborative research with industry such as the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centres and the recent Australian Research Fellowship for the project “Pervasive Lifelong User Modelling for User Controlled Personalisation and Augmented Cognition”, jointly with Associate Professor Bob Kummerfeld. She has been an invited keynote speaker at major research conferences and is President Elect of the Artificial Intelligence in Education Society and is Associate Editor of its journal and the new IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.
Judy has also received several teaching awards including the 2008 CORE National Teaching award, but says the true rewards are working with students: “When you give a little extra help to a student who is struggling, and you see them really master difficult concepts, that is so rewarding. To build computer systems that can help do that for every student: that would be my career highlight.”