Ute Schmid

Professor Ute Schmid is a Full Professor of Cognitive Systems at the University of Bamberg, where she has been a faculty member since September 2004. She leads the Cognitive Systems Group within the Bamberg Center of AI (BaCAI), focusing on creating AI systems that generate human-like explanations and reasoning processes. Her research bridges cognitive science and artificial intelligence to develop methods for explanation generation, inductive programming, and interactive machine learning.

Professor Schmid's work emphasizes practical applications of explainable AI across diverse domains including image classification, medical diagnosis, and educational technologies. Her research on contrastive explanations, near misses, and human-AI alignment has significantly advanced the field of XAI. She has also pioneered research on AI literacy, recognizing the growing importance of basic AI understanding for responsible tool usage by non-experts.

Her publication record demonstrates exceptional productivity and impact, with numerous articles in top-tier venues including Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, and the Journal of Web Semantics. Her 2025 paper 'Aligning generalization between humans and machines' represents a significant theoretical contribution to understanding human-machine cognitive alignment.

Professor Schmid actively contributes to gender diversity research in computer science through studies examining why women pursue PhDs in the field. She has also made important contributions to computing education, investigating how students acquire programming skills and how AI tools like code generators are integrated into learning processes.

As an educator and researcher, Professor Schmid maintains strong international collaborations, with co-authors spanning multiple countries and institutions. Her interdisciplinary approach is evident in her diverse publication venues and collaborative work that bridges computer science, cognitive science, education, and application domains.