Chirag Shah

Chirag Shah is an American computer scientist, author, and a university professor. He is known for his research in information science, particularly in areas such as information seeking, artificial intelligence, and the societal implications of AI systems. He is a professor at the University of Washington Information School, where he also co-directs the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences (RAISE) and founded the InfoSeeking Lab. Shah was awarded the 2024 Research in Information Science Award by Association for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) for his contributions to the field.

Education Shah earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from Dharamsinh Desai Institute of Technology,

In 2010, he earned a PhD in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It has received more than $4 million USD in grants, including from Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

In 2019, Shah was hired by the University of Washington Information School as an associate professor and eventually became the founding co-director of the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences (RAISE).

In 2022, Shah co-authored a study revealing that gender bias in image search results for occupations like "CEO" persists across major search engines, including Google, especially when additional terms like "United States" are included, despite previous claims of bias correction. Shah has expressed concerns regarding the reliability of AI-generated search summaries, noting that the integration of AI into search results could affect users' trust in the information provided.

Honors and awards 2022: ACM Distinguished Member 2024: Research in Information Science Award

Publications Selected research articles 2010, C Shah, J Pomerantz, Evaluating and predicting answer quality in community QA. Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval 2010, B Sayre, L Bode, D Shah, D Wilcox, C Shah, Agenda setting in a digital age: Tracking attention to California Proposition 8 in social media, online news and conventional news, Policy and Internet 2024, S Verma, V Boonsanong, M Hoang, K Hines, J Dickerson, C Shah, Counterfactual explanations and algorithmic resources for machine learning: A review. ACM Computing Surveys

Books A Hands-on Introduction to Machine Learning (2023)– published by Cambridge University Press. Information Access in the Era of Generative AI (2025). ' ''' A Hands-On Introduction to Data Science (2020) – published by Cambridge University Press. Interactive IR User Study Design, Evaluation, and Reporting (2019) – published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ISBN 9781681735818 Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd (2017) – published by Springer. Collaborative Information Seeking: Best Practices, New Domains and New Thoughts (2014) – co-edited with Preben Hansen and Claus-Peter Klas, published by Springer. Collaborative Information Seeking: The Art and Science of Making the Whole Greater than the Sum of All (2012) – published by Springer. ''