Inspiring Women in Heavy Industry: Melinda Hodkiewicz

On International Women’s Day this year Melinda Hodkiewicz, based here in Perth, was announced as a finalist in the Australia/ NZ Women in AI awards, in the AI in manufacturing category. How does an engineer who cut her teeth as a metallurgist, operator and maintenance engineer and is now responsible for teaching Risk, Reliability, Maintenance and Safety to engineering students at the University of Western Australia find herself on this short list?

Melinda’s passion for developing students beyond simple coursework came when she realised there was little opportunity for entrepreneurship for her engineering students. As a believer that an engineer’s primary role is to identify real-world problems and provide innovative solutions, she established the UWA System Health Lab to imagine a richer university experience for digitally savvy students and foster entrepreneurial skills. This was enabled by 8 years of generous funding from BHP in the form of a BHP Fellowship for Engineering for Remote Operations.

“The world is changing fast and engineers need to adapt practices to manage emerging risks and make the most of opportunities. It’s not enough to keep doing the same thing, we need to conceive, test and adopt new ideas.”

Engineering students still need to learn the basics, that will never change. But how they do their work, the opportunities to use more and different data to support decision making, is only going to increase. There are estimates that as much as 30% of engineers time is spent looking for, and checking data. This is not productive.”

The world of AI is opening up more opportunities for organisations than ever before. Engineers can now completely reimagine work flows with the use of natural language processing, ontologies and predictive analytics.

The future of AI and its role in shaping the future of mining, infrastructure and oil and gas is exciting. Melinda and her computer science, maths and statistical colleagues and students at UWA and Curtin are at the forefront of both the research and application within industry.

“There is world class home-grown talent here in WA.”

Quick to note that she gets little time to code herself, she says that “one of the great pleasures of my current work is the close collaboration with my computer science, maths and statistical colleagues and their incredible expertise. I couldn’t do any of this without them.”

Melinda and her colleague Sue Keay are currently coordinate the AI theme of the World Mining Congress due to be held in Brisbane in 2023. The pair are calling for submissions from the people who are managing to join the dots inside their organisations, using digitization to re-imagine workflows, in some cases eliminating work that modern sensing and computers does more reliably, and enabling engineers to use their training in more value-adding ways.

“I am particularly interested in the role that knowledge graphs, ontologies and technical language processing will do to reimagine the work of engineers and transform the way they find and deal with text data.”

CORE was introduced to Melinda initially through foundation partner Unearthed. Melinda and her students would attend the public hack-a-thons where in 3 of the Perth events, Melinda’s students won the Young Innovator Award. Melinda went on to work with CORE through UWA Living Lab Project in 2018 and continues her relationship through collaboration with CORE Skills.

Watch Melinda speak at CORE on research opportunities using open industry data with foundation partner Unearthed.

Melinda left her industry role in the early 1990s where she was at the forefront of introducing condition-based maintenance programs to move back into academia to complete PhD research studies in machine condition monitoring.  From there she moved to establish asset management as a recognised professional discipline and helped write the ISO 55000 Asset Management Standard as Australia’s first nominated representative on the ISO committee. In 2016, she was awarded the MESA Medal, a lifetime award for services to the Asset Management community.

In 2015, Melinda became the BHP Billiton Fellow for Engineering for Remote Operations at UWA. In 2016, she was appointed to the METS Ignited Advisory Council, and in 2017 was appointed to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority Advisory Board. In 2022 she was involved in the Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative and joined the MRIWA Board.

In 2018, Melinda was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at the Alan Turing Institute in London with the Data Centric Engineering group to work on her `Siri for Maintenance’ project; something she describes as ‘’pivotal in helping develop a strategy for this new direction in her career’. She is on the leadership team of the Australian Research Council and industry-funded 5-year $8.8M Centre for Transforming Maintenance through Data Science at Curtin University and the NLP-TLP group at UWA.

“My passion is to work with others to solve interesting problems and develop innovative ways to do things differently, cheaper and faster.”