Ed Huai-Hsin Chi () (born ) is a

Taiwanese American Taiwanese Americans () are Americans who carry full or partial ancestry from Taiwan. This includes American-born citizens who descend from migrants from Taiwan. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, 49% of Taiwanese Americans lived in the state of Califo ...

computer scientist and research scientist at

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, 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 state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

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, 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. ...

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

Palo Alto Research Center PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

(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 December 14, 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 t ...

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

Taekwondo ''Taekwondo'', ''Tae Kwon Do'' or ''Taekwon-Do'' (; ko, 태권도/跆拳道 ) is a Korean martial arts, Korean form of martial arts involving punching and kicking techniques, with emphasis on head-height kicks, spinning jump kicks, and fast k ...

martial artist, photographer, and snowboarder. He is married and has one daughter.

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 Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, a ...

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 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 ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, and

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

, 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 graphs or charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to be easily compared. It uses multiple views to show different parti ...

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

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 weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Eco ...

'', ''

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

'', ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...

'', ''

Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...

'', and ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...

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

Recognition

Chi was elected to the

CHI Academy The CHI 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 co ...

in 2018.

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 People from Minnesota People from Palo Alto, California Scientists at PARC (company)