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.

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 and the Advanced Technology for Education group Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation. Other collaborations include: Digital Health Collaborative Research Centre.

See also my Sydney University page | Office: 307, Computer Science Building, 1 Cleveland Street, Sydney University, 2006 map

For a full list of my publications, see Google scholar and dblp.

Also see Papers available online

• 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

• 2018: Cruiser Interactive moves to Barangaroo

This section is under construction

My current projects are:

• Scrutable user modelling. This has been a core focus of my research. Key publications:

  • 1994: UMUAI paper on accretion/resolution architecture: Kay, Judy. “The um toolkit for cooperative user modelling.” User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 4, no. 3 (1994): 149-196. | pdf

  • 1998: Thesis - my first use of term “scrutable”: A scrutable user modelling shell for user- adapted interaction.

  • 2013: Summary of first fifteen years work: 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: 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

• Lifelong and lifewide user modelling: creating interfaces and infrastructure for people to control and harness their personal long term data for their learning.

• Dashboards for long term personal data.

• Tackling truth decay by creating personalised interfaces that enable people make judge the trustworthiness of online science news.

• E-textbook of the future.

• Ambient appliances and personal sensors to help people tackle long term personal goals for health and wellness.

• Online modules to support communication in oncology by the TRIO, clinician-patient-carer.

• 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)

Current teaching

• 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.

Previous teaching

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:

• Samine Hadadi - Supporting designers in learning to create accessible interfaces

• 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)

• Josh Burridge - The Investigation and Development of Non-Traditional Laboratories in Science and Engineering Education (with: David Lowe , Keith Willey)

• Claudio Diaz Cifuentes Personalised Health Education using Human Centred Technologies Multimodal Data (with: Corinne Caillaud, Kalina Yacef)

• Nisal Menuka Kanwel Gamage Don - Sustainable non-intrusive wearable devices for long term activity monitoring for applications in healthcare and education (with: Anusha Withana)

• Ben Taylor - Designing a collaborative learning tool for learning at scale (with: Peter Reimann)

• Chris Wong - Sequence Based recommender for personalised curriculum planning (with: Kalina Yacef)

• Jiakun Yu - Soft and flexible smart sensor for monitoring long-term gastrointestinal activities (with: Anusha Withana)

Also see alumni and their theses.

• ACE 2021 Conf 1-5 Feb, 2021
• SIGCSE Conf 13-20 Mar, 2021 ito appear: (A Data-centric Computing Curriculum for a Data Science Major, Fekete, Kay, Röhm)
• AIED 2021 Paper deadline: 1 Feb 2021 Abstracts, 8 Feb papers, 1 Mar workshops, Conf 14-18 June, 2021
• LAK 2021 Deadlines: Conf April 12-16, 2021 (Early rego 25 Feb)
• IUI 2021 Conf 13-17 April, 2021
• Ubicomp 2021
• Ubicomp 2022 in Australia

• Judy.Kay@gmail.com
• +61-2-9351-4502
• Room 307, School of IT Building, J12, School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia