Eva Hudlicka is a two-field scientist, working in both AI and cognitive science. Her overriding interest is in human information processing and human cognition. Her goal is to build systems that enhance human use of information and knowledge.
Her AI work deals primarily with model-based reasoning and its applications to expert systems, training and tutoring, and information management. She emphasizes one central idea in this work: By representing the domain of interest in terms of a model that is consistent with a person's mental model of that domain, an expert system could provide better explanation and support training.
She was a project manager for a NASA-funded project to develop an expert, model-based aiding system for commercial aircraft pilots. One of the outcomes of the project was a development environment for constructing causal model-based systems. Now Hudlicka wants to find funding to apply these techniques to other domains, particularly to biology and medicine, and eventually to extend the techniques into multimedia environments.
Hudlicka earned her PhD in AI at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Afterwards, she began shifting toward cognitive science and computational psychology. She is now building computational models of human information processing, focusing on such models as planning, decision making, and complex, skilled behavior. She is particularly interested in the memory structures that produce intelligent behavior and the processes that operate on these structures. She and her colleagues are looking at the existing ``unified theories of cognition,'' such as SOAR and Act*, and are building a testbed that will let researchers experiment with various models of human information processing.
Hudlicka says she never felt discriminated against because she was female. The University of Massachusetts was a fairly nonsexist environment, and the presence of ``quite a number of female grad students'' certainly helped. On the other hand, the general ``female'' characteristics, such as lack of confidence in one's own ideas, did affect her. ``I remember many times talking to people who were so self- assured about their work and just `knew' they were right - and early on in my career I was only too ready to assume that indeed they were and I was wrong. This hurt me during the selection of my dissertation topic. I think I might have focused on the type of work I do now much earlier if I had had more confidence in my intuitions-which turned out to have been right most of the time!''
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