(c) Maddie S. Chai For those that miss Maddie's old bio drawing, here it is.

Sun-Ki Chai is Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Hawai`i. He was born in Seoul, Korea, but moved to Honolulu when he was one year old, and was raised in Manoa (actually living on UHM campus when he was a kid).

Dr. Sun-Ki Chai’s professional life has been devoted to innovation in social science theories of culture and behavior, as well as the development of more valid and reliable techniques for integrating such theories into software architectures. He has a BS in Mathematical Sciences, an MS in Computer Science, and a PhD in Political Science, all from Stanford University, well as work towards an MJ in Journalism at UC Berkeley. As a Principal Investigator, he has been awarded Department of Defense grants over the past five years totaling over $3.5 million, all for interdisciplinary projects that that integrate social science theory and methods with software development. He is on the steering committee for the Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling, and Prediction (SBP), which is now the largest conference focusing on social analysis across disciplines. He was co-program chair for SPB09, and will be co-organizing chiar for SBP10. He is workshop/tutorial co-chair for the IEEE Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom) and co-program chair for the 2010 ACM/EEE Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom). He co-organized a workshop on Theoretical Frontiers in Modeling Identity and Conflict that led to the formation of the first social science advisory panel at AFOSR. His goal is to develop a true interdisciplinary body that unites predictive social science and social computing, as well as uniting general social science approaches from different disciplines.

Dr. Chai’s early efforts focused on theory integration in the social sciences, more specifically integrating models of culture with predictive models of action. His main empirical interests are identity-based conflict and violence, as well as the effect of cultural interactions on national economic and political development. He is the author of Choosing an Identity: A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation (University of Michigan Press, 2001), the first work in the social sciences to build a general predictive model of individual and collective cultural change, one that is compatible with the rational choice and game-theoretical models that dominate social science work behavioral prediction, but improves the accuracy of their predictions. In reviews, The American Journal of Sociology stated that, ``Choosing an Identity is an incredibly ambitious book. Chai not only proposes a new, formal model of preference and belief formation, he also examines three large literatures and offers new theoretical tests within them.'' The eminent theorist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has written ``Sun-Ki Chai has written a very original and stunningly researched book that is clearly written.’’

Dr Chai is also co-editor of the books Culture and Social Theory (Transaction Publishers, 1998) and Advances in Social Computing (Springer, 2010), and has published articles in the disciplines of sociology, political science, and economics, as well as in computer science. He has also worked for years to formalize and integrate cultural constructs from anthropology and sociology, particularly the grid-group typology, and to make them compatible with computational modeling. He is also experienced in social network theories and social science content analysis, and has received a U.S. patent (#7499965) for development of a specialized web crawler which uses social science theories and methods to identify and analyze virtual communities. His background in computer science and multiple social sciences provides him with a unique ability to span the still-large gap between social and computer scientists in socio-cultural modeling.

His main theoretical interests are the study of formal, computational models of culture, as well as their integration with choice-theoretic models of action and network models of structure. His main substantive interests are in international development, with more specific studies on the role of cultural institutions in the economic development of East Asian industrializing economies and on the social construction of ethnic identity and its role in collective action and conflict.

His avocational interests include ethnic cookery (where he once led a forum named "Hawaii's best food blog" by Honolulu Weekly), Asian pop culture (long before C,J, K, or I were prefixes), and lately Test cricket (though he has never even watched a live match). Before returning for his PhD, he held variety of jobs, including OCR software developer at IBM Research, newspaper reporter at Kona's West Hawaii Today, lecturer at the UHM Electrical Engineering department, and educational media specialist at Kapiolani Community College. He is also a failed fiction writer (aren't we all?).

He is married to Hye-ryeon Lee, Interim Associate Dean of Humanities, and member of the UHM Speech Communication Department and Hawai`i Cancer Center, and they have two children, Alexander Sunyoung and Madeleine Sunwoo.