Aaron Halfaker (; born December 27, 1983) is principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research. He previously served as a

research scientist A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophic ...

at the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

until 2020.

Education

Halfaker earned a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

degree in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from the College of St. Scholastica in 2006, where he started off as a physical therapy major but switched to computer science after taking a programming class with Diana Johnson. He subsequently earned a PhD in computer science from the

GroupLens Research GroupLens Research is a human–computer interaction research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities specializing in recommender systems and online communities. GroupLens also wor ...

lab at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

in 2013.

Career and research

Halfaker is known for his research on

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

and the decrease in the number of active editors of the site. He has said that Wikipedia began a "decline phase" around 2007 and has continued to decline since then. Halfaker has also studied

software agent In computer science, a software agent or software AI is a computer program that acts for a user or other program in a relationship of agency, which derives from the Latin ''agere'' (to do): an agreement to act on one's behalf. Such "action on beha ...

s (bots) on Wikipedia, and the way they affect new contributors to the site. While a graduate student he developed a tool for Wikipedia editing called Snuggle with Stuart Geiger. Snuggle tackles

vandalism on Wikipedia On Wikipedia, vandalism is editing the project in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner. Vandalism includes any addition, removal, or modification that is intentionally humorous, nonsensical, a hoax, offensive, libelous or degradin ...

and highlights constructive contributions by new editors. He has also built an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

(AI) service called Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES), used to identify vandalism on Wikipedia and distinguish it from good faith edits.

References

University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni Living people American computer scientists Wikipedia researchers Wikimedia Foundation staff members Human–computer interaction researchers College of St. Scholastica alumni People from Virginia, Minnesota 1983 births American Wikimedians {{US-compu-bio-stub