Aaron Halfaker
American computer scientist (born 1983)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aaron Halfaker (/ˈhæfeɪkər/; born December 27, 1983) is a principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research.[4][7][5] He previously served as a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation until 2020.[8][9][10]
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University of Minnesota (PhD)[2][3]
Wikimedia Foundation
Google[5]
Aaron Halfaker | |
|---|---|
Halfaker in September 2013 | |
| Born | December 27, 1983 |
| Alma mater | The College of St. Scholastica (BS) University of Minnesota (PhD)[2][3] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | Microsoft Research Wikimedia Foundation Google[5] |
| Thesis | Maintaining the efficiency of open production systems at scale: A case study of wikipedia (2013) |
| Doctoral advisor | John T. Riedl[6] |
| Website | halfaker |
Education
Halfaker earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the College of St. Scholastica in 2006, where he started off as a physical therapy major but switched to computer science after taking a programming class with Diana Johnson.[11] He subsequently earned a PhD in computer science from the GroupLens Research lab at the University of Minnesota in 2013.[6]
Career and research
Halfaker is known for his research[12][13] about the decrease in the number of active editors on Wikipedia.[14][15][16] He has said in autumn 2013 that Wikipedia began a "decline phase" around 2007 and has continued to decline since then.[17][18] Halfaker has also studied software agents (bots) on Wikipedia,[19] and the way they affect new contributors to the site.[8] While a graduate student he developed a tool for Wikipedia editing called Snuggle with Stuart Geiger. Snuggle tackles vandalism on Wikipedia and highlights constructive contributions by new editors.[20][21] He has also built an artificial intelligence (AI) service called Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) in 2015, used to identify vandalism on Wikipedia and distinguish it from good faith edits.[22][23]
