Brief Bio: Ed H. Chi is the Area Manager and a Principal Scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. He leads 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 19 patents and over 50 research articles, his most well-known past project is the study of Information Scent --- understanding how users navigate and understand the Web and information environments. Most recently, he leads a group of researchers at PARC to understand the underlying mechanisms in online social systems such as Wikipedia and social tagging sites. He has also worked on information visualization, computational molecular biology, ubicomp, and recommendation/search engines. He has won awards for both teaching and research. In his spare time, Ed is an avid Taekwondo martial artist, photographer, and snowboarder.

Some projects that he has participated in include:

• Information Scent on the Web (Xerox PARC)
  
• Web Analysis Visualization Spreadsheet (Xerox PARC)
  
• Visualization of Web Ecology (Xerox PARC)
  
• Visualization tools for DNA and Protein Sequence Similarity Analysis(U of M)
  
• WebSpace Visualization (Geometry Center)
  
• Visualization of Java program execution performance (IBM, U of M),
  
• GroupLens Collaborative Filtering Project (U of M)