Aaron Halfaker | |
---|---|
Born | |
Alma mater | The College of St. Scholastica (BS) University of Minnesota (PhD)[5][6] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | Microsoft Research Wikimedia Foundation Google[2] |
Thesis | Maintaining the efficiency of open production systems at scale: A case study of wikipedia (2013) |
Doctoral advisor | John T. Riedl[3] |
Website | halfaker |
Aaron Halfaker (/ˈhæfeɪkər/; born December 27, 1983) is a principal applied scientist at Microsoft Research.[1][7][2] He previously served as a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation until 2020.[8][9][10]
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.[3]
Halfaker is known for his research on Wikipedia[12][13] and the decrease in the number of active editors of the site.[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]