Robert Tienwen Chien (Chinese: 錢 天 問; November 20, 1931 – December 8, 1983) was an American computer scientist concerned largely with research in information theory, fault-tolerance, and artificial intelligence (AI), director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and known for his invention of the Chien search and seminal contributions to the PMC model in system level fault diagnosis.
Robert Tienwen Chien was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu, China as the youngest of eight children, and emigrated to the United States in 1952 to continue his technical studies, enrolling at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
[3] In addition, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois also invites extraordinary researchers to give the Robert T. Chien Distinguished Lecture [4] each year.
Notably, while CSL director, he created an Outstanding Staff Award, the first such recognition of this type at the University of Illinois.
Chien is best known for two seminal contributions, the Chien Search,[5] a fast algorithm for determining the roots of a polynomial over a finite field and a model system-level fault diagnosis,[1] known today as the PMC (Preparata-Metze-Chien) model, which is a main issue in the design of highly dependable processing systems.