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Chris Newell

Chris Newell is an engineer whose work spans recommendation systems, scholarly data and open multimodal models. He coauthored recommendation research, the 2023 Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform paper and the 2024 Molmo and PixMo report. The Molmo and PixMo paper appeared at CVPR in 2025. As of October 2026, he is an engineering manager in Seattle at the Allen Institute for AI.

Works
31
Citations
1,109
h-index
5

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2012–2013

    Recommender systems

    His 2012 paper focuses on the user experience of recommender systems. In 2013, he and Libby Miller coauthor a design and evaluation of a client-side recommender system.

  2. 2015–2016

    Recommendation algorithms

    He coauthors the 2015 paper Blockbusters and Wallflowers, which studies accurate, diverse recommendations with random walks. In 2016, he coauthors a paper on accurate, diverse and scalable recommendations for interactive applications.

  3. 2023

    The Semantic Scholar platform

    He coauthors a 2023 paper about the Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform, which describes its Academic Graph and APIs.

  4. 2024

    Molmo and PixMo

    In 2024, he coauthors Molmo and PixMo, introducing an open family of vision-language models and datasets for image captions, image questions and 2D pointing.

  5. 2025

    Molmo at CVPR

    The Molmo and PixMo paper appears at CVPR in 2025, with Newell among its coauthors and the Allen Institute for AI among its listed affiliations.

  6. As of October 2026

    Engineering manager

    As of October 2026, he is an engineering manager in Seattle at the Allen Institute for AI.

Career

  1. Since 2026Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Engineering manager
  2. 2012–2024British Broadcasting Corporation

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. Explaining the user experience of recommender systems2012 · User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction · 800 citations
  2. Updatable, Accurate, Diverse, and Scalable Recommendations for Interactive Applications2016 · ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems · 82 citations
  3. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models2025 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 66 citationsWith Ali Farhadi, Andrew Head, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Chris Callison-Burch, Christopher Clark and Crystal Nam
  4. The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform2023 · 63 citationsWith Bailey Kuehl, Daniel S. Weld and Oren Etzioni
  5. Blockbusters and Wallflowers2015 · ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) · 59 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate how 14,272 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs and government research centers, with net flows and the most common paths.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Chris Newell yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Chris Newell csauthors.net. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Updatable, Accurate, Diverse, and Scalable Recommendations for Interactive Applications explore.metascienceobservatory.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. CVPR 2025 Open Access Repository openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Chris Newell - Seattle, Washington, Allen Institute for AI | about.me about.me. Checked 19 October 2026.