Judy Hochberg received an A.B. in linguistics, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Harvard University in 1982. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1986. She then spent three years in Chicago, the first two as an NICHD-funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, and the third year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the linguistics department at Northwestern University. During these years, Judy's research focused on language acquisition, especially the acquisition of phonology. She published papers in Language and Journal of Child Language.
From 1989 to 2000, Judy worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first as a Director's funded Postdoctoral Fellow, then as a Technical Staff member. During these years she transitioned from purely academic research to applied research in a computational environment. Her research encompassed topics in computational linguistics (speech recognition, text categorization), document image processing, and computer security. She published papers in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, and other journals, as well as several conference proceedings. She obtained a patent for her work on document image processing, and won a LANL Distinguished Performance Award, an R&D 100 Award, and other honors. Links to some of Judy's LANL projects can be found here.
Judy left Los Alamos last year to join Soliloquy, a Silicon Alley company that developed dialog systems for on-line customer interactions, and recently came to IBM to further pursue research in dialog systems. She is currently working on the DARPA Communicator project, developing dialog systems for making travel arrangements over the telephone or through wireless text channels. She is particularly interested in how dialogs can be made more flexible to accommodate users with different goals, languages, and communication channels.