Peter Chen

Peter Pin-Shan Chen (born 3 January 1947) is a Taiwanese American computer scientist.

He is a (retired) distinguished career scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Distinguished Chair Professor Emeritus at LSU.

Born 1947 in Taichung, Taiwan, Peter Chen received a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1968 at the National Taiwan University, and a Ph.D. in computer science/applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1973.

In 1970, he worked one summer at IBM.

After graduating from Harvard, he spent one year at Honeywell and a summer at Digital Equipment Corporation.

From 1974 to 1978 Chen was an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is known for the development of the entity–relationship model in 1976.

From 1978 to 1983 he was an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA Management School).

In 1979, he founded an annual international professional meeting, the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, which has been held in different countries.

He also founded the Data & Knowledge Engineering journal for publishing and disseminating scholarly research results.

From 1983 to 2011 Chen held the position of M. J. Foster Distinguished Chair Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University and, for several years, adjunct professor in its Business School and Medical School (Shreveport).

During this period, he was a visiting professor once at Harvard in '89-'90 and three times at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (EECS Dept. in '86-'87, Sloan School in '90-'91, and Division of Engineering Systems in 06-'07).

Besides lecturing around the world, he has also served as an (honorary) professor outside of the U.S. In 1984, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, he taught a one-month short course on databases at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, and was awarded as Honorary Professor there.

Then, he went to Beijing as a member of the IEEE delegation of the First International Conference on Computers and Applications (the first major IEEE computer conference held in China).

He received the Data Resource Management Technology Award from the Data Administration Management Association (DAMA International) in New York City in 1990.

He was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), IEEE, and ER.

Chen's work is also cited in the book Software Challenges published by Time-Life Books in 1993 in the series on "Understanding Computers."

Chen is recognized as one of the pioneers in a book on "Software Pioneers".

He is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World.

Chen has received many awards in the fields of Information Technology.

He won the Achievement Award in Information Management in 2000 from DAMA International.

He was an inductee into the Data Management Hall of Fame in 2000.

He received the Stevens Award in Software Method Innovation in 2001.

In 2003, Chen received the IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award at the IEEE-CS Board of Governors meeting in San Diego.

He was presented with the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award at the ACM Banquet in San Diego in June 2003 and International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Acapulco in August 2003.

He is a member of the advisory board of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of National Science Foundation (2004-2006) and the United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (2005-2009).

Chen's original paper is one of the most influential papers in the computer software field based on a survey of more than 1,000 computer science professors documented in a book on "Great Papers in Computer Science".

Chen is also the recipient of the Pan Wen-Yuan Outstanding Research Award in 2004.

From 2008 to 2014, he was an Honorary Chair Professor at the Institute of Service Science at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.

To recognize Chen's pioneering leadership role, the "Peter P. Chen Award" was established in 2008, to honor excellent researchers/educators for outstanding contributions to the field of conceptual modeling each year.

The recipients of the Peter P. Chen Award are:

From 2010 to 2020, Chen was a Distinguished Career Scientist and faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, U.S.A.

In June 2011 in Jeju Island, Korea, Chen received the Transformative Achievement Medal from the Software Engineering Society and the Society for Design and Process Science.

In 2021, he received the Leadership Award from the IEEE Technical Committee of Service Computing (TCSVC).

His innovative work initiated/accelerated a new field of research and practice called "Conceptual Modeling" based on conceptual model (computer science) or Entity–Relationship model.

To recognize Chen's pioneering role and contributions in building the foundation for big data modeling and analysis, the "Peter Chen Big Data Young Researcher Award" was established in 2015 by the Service Society and the steering committee of eight co-located IEEE Conferences (IEEE ICWS/SCC/CLOUD/MS/BigDataCongress/SERVICES), to honor a very promising young big data researcher each year in the IEEE Big Data Congress and co-located conferences, starting from IEEE BigData 2015 Congress.

The Peter Chen Big Data Young Researcher Award winners are:

The entity–relationship model serves as the foundation of many systems analysis and design methodologies, computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, and repository systems.

Starting in 2016, he is an Honorary Chair Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, Asia University (Taiwan).

Chen has served as an advisor for government agencies and corporations.