I lead the multi-disciplinary Human Centred Technology Research Cluster at the University of Sydney, Australia.
My research is in the areas of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A core driver has been to create systems that enable people to harness their personal data for lifelong and life-wide learning. My research creates systems and interfaces for user models that people can scrutinise, to really see, understand and control their personal data and its use. This is core to people managing privacy and use of their data. In learning contexts, interfaces onto learning data, Open Learner Models (OLM), provide a new way for people to harness data to manage their learning. This is because it suppose metacognitive processes like self-monitoring, reflection and planning, closely related to self-regulation in lifelong learning for important areas of health and wellness. My research is based on rich collaborations with researchers in diverse areas, such as nutrition, physical activity, psychology, medical informatics and ehealth.
My research collaborations include: Digital Health Collaborative Research Centre and within Sydney University, I belong to Charles Perkins Centre Nodes, Active Ageing, Digital Health Information Network, Health literacy chronic disease network and Wireless wellbeing and personalised health.
See also my Sydney University page | Office: 307, Computer Science Building, 1 Cleveland Street, Sydney University, 2006 map
PhD in Computer Science, 1999
University of Sydney
For a full list of my publications, see Google scholar and dblp.
Also see Papers available online
5 - 9 Oct 2024, General Chair (with Vassilis Kostakos and Thuong Hoang), Ubicomp/ISWC 2024, Melbourne, Australia
8-12 July, 2024, 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2024), Recife Brazil.
1 Jul, 2024, Workshop Chair (with Owen Conlan) [Second Workshop on Context Representation in User Modeling (CRUM)] (https://crum-workshop.github.io/index.html), at 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2024)
8 Nov, 2023: Invited talk, How research in personalization and Open Learner Modeling can inform future assessments, @ Exploring Personalization in the Service of Equity, ETS (Educational Testing Service), Princeton, New Jersey
8-12 Oct 2023, Technical Program Chair (with Silvia Santini and Edison Thomaz), Ubicomp/ISWC 2023, Cancún, Mexico.
20 - 23 Nov 2022, General Chair (with Craig Anslow) Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2022), hybrid in Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
13 Sep 2022, Program Committee and speaker: NUTEL - Nudges in Technology-Enhanced Learning, in conjunction with ECTEL 2022.
18 - 21 Jul, 2022, Invited speaker: Temporal Aspects in User Modeling, Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation
17 - 31 Jul 2022, AIED 2022: The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED2022) hybrid in Durham University, UK.
13 - 15 Jul 2022, Invited Keynote: 9th International Conference on Open and Innovative Education (ICOIE 2022) - Keynotes speakers
21-26 June, 2021, User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2021, Utrecht/Virtual, Netherlands.
14-18 Jun, 2021, Invited keynote at the 2021 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2021, Utrecht/Virtual, Netherlands, Theme: Mind the Gap: AIED for Equity and Inclusion.
6–11 Jun, 2021, Dagstuhl Seminar Transparency by Design. Organizers: Casey Dugan, IBM Research – Cambridge, US; Judy Kay, The University of Sydney, AU; Tsvi Kuflik, Haifa University, IL; Michael Rovatsos, University of Edinburgh, GB.
8-13 May, 2021, CHI 2021
14-19 Mar, 2021, Invited keynote at ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR’21) The Case for Scrutable, Personal, Long-Term User Models for Information Retrieval, Abstract
13-20 Mar, 2021 SIGCSE Technical Symposium – Alan Fekete, Judy Kay and Uwe Röhm will present A Data-centric Computing Curriculum for a Data Science Major
4 Mar, 2021, Sarah Howard, Simon Buckingham Shum, Judy Kay ACS Panel discussion: How AI transforms the learning experience
8-9 Feb, 2021, Invited speaker at BIOTech Futures Challenge Virtual Symposium for high school students, Topic: Human-centred AI for human health
10-11 Dec, 2020: Closing Keynote at Empowering Learners for the AI Age, Title: Empowering People to Harness their Data for Lifelong and Life-wide Learning. Press.
21-22 May, 2020: Keynote speaker at CHI Down Under 2020, Australia and New Zealand virtual CHI event, 21-22 May 2020 2020, Title “Learning to see, with uncertainty: lessons, reflections and vision for our community”.
7 Aug, 2019: Invited speaker at Emerging Digital Technologies & Ergonomics in Health, Ageing & Education, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA) Professional Development Seminar.
Nov 2018: 2018 ACM Distinguished Member, For Outstanding Scientific Contributions to Computing
Scrutable user modelling to enable people to be in control of their personal data and its use. Key publications:
1998: My thesis and first use of term “scrutable”, A scrutable user modelling shell for user-adapted interaction. I chose scrutable to reflect the effort people need to invest – this contrasts with the common term transparent. Scrutable is human-centred, describing what people do, – by contrast, eXplainable AI is what machine does.
2013: Summary of first fifteen years work with many outstanding collaborators and students: Kay, Judy, and Bob Kummerfeld. “Creating personalized systems that people can scrutinize and control: Drivers, principles and experience.” ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) 2, no. 4 (2013): 1-42. | pdf
2019: Vision for new architecture to give learners control over their data, Kay, Judy, and Bob Kummerfeld. “From data to personal user models for life‐long, life‐wide learners.” British Journal of Educational Technology 50, no. 6 (2019): 2871-2884. | pdf
Interfaces and infrastructure for life-wide and life-long learning from long term data. This has several threads
All of these build on aspects of scutability and enabling people to harness their long term data to support learning.
Honours thesis projects for Semester 2 2024 will be in aspects of harnessing wearable data to help people understand their long term activity towards learning to be more active and less inactive.
Editor-in-chief (2012 -) IJAIED: International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education | Springer site | IAIED | Submissions and reviews | ERIC | May 2020 Citescore 9.1, rank 9⁄1254 Education, 7⁄128 Computational Theory and Maths
Editor (2018 -) Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) | PCS submissions
Editorial Board (2000 - ): User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) | submissions | SCImago HCI
Advisory Board (2019 - ): ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS)
Management Committee (2012 -) Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (IAIED) | Facebook | management
Advisory Board (2014 - ) User Modeling (UM Inc) Roof Body for User Modeling and Personalization Conferences (UMAP)
Human-in-the-loop data analytics | DATA3506 Syllabus
Usability Engineering | COMP5427 Syllabus
Advanced research methods for HCI | INFO4994/5995 Syllabus | This reading unit for PhD and Honours thesis students covers recent papers illustrating diverse research methods for human computer interaction (HCI) from venues such as CHI, CSCW, UIST and IMWUT.
Problem Based Learning (PBL): Over several years, we established and refined the approach to teaching programming fundamentals along with a very broad problem-based skills. If you are considering this approach you may find the resources below useful.
Kay, J., Barg, M., Fekete, A., Greening, T., Hollands, O., Kingston, J. H., & Crawford, K. (2000). Problem-based learning for foundation computer science courses. Computer Science Education, 10(2), 109-128. DOI | Tech Report
Student resources: 80 page student resources
Tutor scripts week by week: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
Curriculum mapping: The CUSP system was created to tackle the challenge of designing a university curriculum that builds generic skills such as communication. This has been commercialised as u-improve and published in the PhD work of Richard Gluga.
Building group work skills: This aspect of my teaching has been core to several HCI and AIED reseach projects. This is reflected in the publications by PhD alumni Andrew Clayphan, Roberto Martinez Maldonado, undergraduate reseach by Kim Upton and Dilhan Perera.
Current research students:
Kim Bente - Uncertainty quantification and communication in environmental modelling (Co-supervisor: Sally Cripps funded by ARC Training Centre in Data Analytics for Resources and Environments (DARE) Centre
Samine Hadadi - Supporting designers in creating accessible interfaces: ACM SRC Grand Finalist 2021-2022
Bernard Bucalon - Visualising Performance Data (Co-supervisors: Tim Shaw, Kerri Brown)
Ying An Chen - Evaluation of Benefits Using a Third-Person in Virtual Reality Educational Games (Co-supervisors: Marcus Carter, Soojeong Yoo)
Waheeb Yaqub - Design of interfaces to overcome junk science news (Co-supervisor: Micah Goldwater)
I am also co-supervising:
Alan Yung - Exploring support for oncologists with the data that drives decisions in diagnosis and treatments (with: Tim Shaw)
Saaz Sahdra - Understanding the person-specific predictors of athlete performance (with: Kalina Yacef and Grant Duthie)
Annie Yihong Yuan - Enhancing Personalized Learning in Educational Recommender Systems: Integrating Deep Learning Models, Contextual, and Adaptive Profiling for Dynamic Recommendation (with: David Lowe and Kalina Yacef)
Also see alumni and their theses.