Alumnus Ed Chi of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has been in the news lately (Time Magazine, The Economist, the Associated Press, and Information Week are some) because of interest in his work on Web usability. He and colleagues at PARC use the concept of information "foraging" to describe the behavior of Web users as they traverse Web links in searching for information, likening this behavior to that of an animal foraging for food in the wild. They also use a concept called "information scent" to give a measure of the cost and value of accessing a Web page. Using these ideas they hope to produce tools to help understand the relationships among user needs, user actions, and Web site design.

Ed was at the U of M in late February participating in an IMA (Institute for Mathematics and its Applications) Workshop on the Digital Library and Information Access, giving a talk about the "Scent of the Web," and visiting friends.

Ed is originally from Taiwan, the child of academic parents. He spent a year in Minnesota when he was in fifth grade and then came back four years later to go to South High, when his mother decided to complete a Ph.D. at the U. He overlapped his bachelor's degree work with high school, completing the requirements for a B.S. in C.S. in two years in '94. During this time, he worked at the Geometry Center on visualizing mathematical structures, and created one of the first visualizations of the Web in 1994. He continued on at the U for his M.S. in C.S., completed in December '96 in computational molecular biology with an emphasis in information visualization. He had thought of going to another school for a Ph.D., but decided to stay at the U, and working with Professor John Riedl as his thesis advisor. He completed his doctorate in March '99 in the areas of visualization, user interfaces, and graphics. For his thesis, Ed developed a spreadsheet for visualization in which each cell can contain a data set represented using interactive graphics. The spreadsheet analogy is continued with the availability of operations on individual cells and among cells.

In '97 Ed was fortunate to get an internship at Xerox PARC. His work had attracted some attention there and he had met Stuart Card at a conference, both of which gave Ed an edge in getting one of these highly competitive internships. He had another internship at PARC, and when he graduated in March of '99, he started work there. Ed finds Xerox PARC a wonderful environment for doing interdisciplinary work. Sometime in the future, he may consider an academic career since he enjoyed teaching, and both parents are academics. But for now, he is very happy to be working at PARC.

One might think that someone who completed his Ph.D. less than seven years after graduating from high school must work all the time. This is not true of Ed who has many interests, including Tae Kwon Do, photography, riding his motorcycle, making pottery, and writing poetry. For more information about Ed, including papers and links to press articles, see his Web site http://www.geekbiker.com.

-Bobbie Othmer