W4A 2013

Dr. Ed H. Chi – Staff Research Scientist at Google Inc.

Ed H. Chi is a Research Scientist at Google, focusing on social interaction research relating to social search, recommendation, annotations, and analytics. Previous to Google, he was the Area Manager and a Principal Scientist at Palo Alto Research Center’s Augmented Social Cognition Group, where he led the group in understanding how Web2.0 and Social Computing systems help groups of people to remember, think and reason. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota, and has been doing research on user interface software systems since 1993. He has been featured and quoted in the press, including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Associated Press.

With over 20 patents and over 90 research articles, he is known for research in Web and online social sites, and the effects of social signals on user behavior. For example, he led a group of researchers at PARC to understand the underlying mechanisms in Wikipedia. He has also worked on information visualization, computational molecular biology, ubicomp, and recommendation/search engines, and has won awards for both teaching and research. In his spare time, Ed is an avid photographer and snowboarder.

You can find him at edchi.net.

Ed will deliver the keynote speech The False Dichotomy between Accessibility and Usability on Tuesday 14, in the morning.