Ed Huai-Hsin Chi ( zh, t=紀懷新, w=Chi⁴ Huai²-hsin¹) (born ) is a

Taiwanese American Taiwanese Americans (traditional Chinese, Chinese: 臺灣裔美國人; pinyin: ''Táiwān yì měiguó rén''; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: ''Tâi-Bí-jîn'') are Americans of Taiwanese people, Taiwanese ancestry, including American-born descendants of migrant ...

computer scientist and research scientist at

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

, known for his early work in applying the theory of information scent to predict usability of websites.

Biography

Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Chi moved to

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

in the 9th grade. He obtained his BA in 1994, his MA in 1996 and his PhD in 1999, all at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

. After his MA graduation, Chi worked as a research scientist at

Palo Alto Research Center Future Concepts division (formerly Palo Alto Research Center, PARC and Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a div ...

(PARC) from 1997 to 2011. He started as an intern and was officially hired in 1999. From 1999-2007, he worked in the User Interface Research Group, during which time he was promoted to senior research scientist in 2005. He became area manager of the Augmented Social Group in 2007. In 2011, he left PARC and became a research scientist at Google, reporting directly to

Peter Norvig Peter Norvig (born 14 December 1956) is an American computer scientist and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig is th ...

in the areas of human-computer interaction and social computing. In 2017, he was promoted to principal scientist at Google, and to Distinguished Scientist in 2021. In his spare time, Chi is an avid golfer,

Taekwondo Taekwondo (; ; ) is a Korean martial art and combat sport involving primarily kicking techniques and punching. "Taekwondo" can be translated as ''tae'' ("strike with foot"), ''kwon'' ("strike with hand"), and ''do'' ("the art or way"). In ad ...

black belt, photographer, and snowboarder.

Work

Chi specializes in

social computing Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and tech ...

and human-computer interaction. He has developed a computer system that predicts usability of Websites based on the theory of information scent, a theory by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card that pioneered ways of understanding how people search for information online. He is also known for his work on

information visualization Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...

and authored the book ''A Framework for Visualizing Information'', which describes approaches to make information visualization systems easier to develop through the use of reference models. His recent research has analyzed social behavior in large sociotechnical systems like

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, and

Digg Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...

, among other social software platforms. He has published over 80 academic articles, and he has over 20 patents. His top 9 publications have over 200 citations each.

"A Framework for Information Visualization Spreadsheets"

Chi's dissertation, titled, "A Framework for Information Visualization Spreadsheets", was chaired by John T. Riedl. The dissertation was an early example of the power of

small multiple A small multiple (sometimes called trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart, or panel chart) is a series of similar infographic, graphs or charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to be easily compared. It uses multiple views to show di ...

s in information visualizations. During this time, he was awarded a University of Minnesota Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Research Contribution Award, Doctoral Dissertation Award, and Best Teaching Award.

Academic work

Chi has chaired top conferences and publishes regularly in top-tier academic conferences in

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

and human-computer interaction related fields. His work has been covered in various newspapers and magazines around the world, including ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...

'', ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'', ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'', ''

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "''The''" in its name on April 23, 1998, under then pu ...

'', and ''

Wired Wired may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''Wired'' (Jeff Beck album), 1976 * ''Wired'' (Hugh Cornwell album), 1993 * ''Wired'' (Mallory Knox album), 2017 * "Wired", a song by Prism from their album '' Beat Street'' * "Wired ...

''. While at PARC, Chi published a paper analyzing edits to Wikipedia, looking at content contributed vs the author's edit count. In 2012, Chi served as the technical program co-chair for

CHI __NOTOC__ Chi may refer to: __NOTOC__ Greek *Chi (letter) (Χ or χ), the twenty-second letter of the Greek alphabet Chinese * ''Chi'' (length) (尺), a traditional unit of length, about ⅓ meter *Chi (mythology) (螭), a dragon * Chi (surname) ...

, the most prestigious academic conference in the field of HCI.

Recognition

Chi was elected to the

CHI Academy The SIGCHI Academy is a group of researchers honored by SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group in Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. Each year, 5–8 new members are elected for having made a significant, cumulative ...

in 2018. He was named to the 2022 class of

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

s, "for contributions to machine learning and data mining techniques for social computing and recommender systems". In 2023, he was awarded the Distinguished Alumni award by the University of Minnesota Computer Science department.

Selected publications

* Chi, Ed Huai-hsin, ed. ''A Framework for Visualizing Information''. Vol. 1. Springer Science & Business Media, 2002. Articles, a selection: * Chi, Ed H
"A taxonomy of visualization techniques using the data state reference model"
''Information Visualization, 2000. InfoVis 2000. IEEE Symposium On''. IEEE, 2000. * Chi, Ed H., et al
"Using information scent to model user information needs and actions and the Web"
''Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors in Computing Systems''. ACM, 2001. * Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B. A., & Chi, E. H. (April 2007)
"He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia"
In ''Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors in Computing Systems'' (pp. 453–462). ACM. * Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh
"Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk"
''Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors in Computing Systems''. ACM, 2008. * Suh, B., Hong, L., Pirolli, P., & Chi, E. H. (2010, August)
"Want to be Retweeted? Large Scale Analytics on Factors Impacting Retweet in Twitter Network"
In ''Social Computing (Socialcom), 2010 IEEE Second International Conference On'' (pp. 177–184). IEEE.

References

External links

Ed Chi
at University of Minnesota
''Ed H. Chi's musings''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chi, Ed 1970s births Living people Google employees University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering alumni Human–computer interaction researchers Social information processing Taiwanese computer scientists Academics from Minnesota People from Palo Alto, California Scientists at PARC (company) 2022 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people)