Tutorial T4-M - Introduction to Social Computing

Abstract

With the advent of Web 2.0, Social Computing has emerged as one of the hot research topics recently. Social Computing involves the investigation of collective intelligence by using computational techniques such as machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, etc. on social behavior data collected from blogs, wikis, clickthrough data, query logs, tags, etc. from areas such as social networks, social search, social media, social bookmarks, social news, social knowledge sharing, and social games. In this tutorial, we will introduce Social Computing and elaborate on how the various characteristics and aspects are involved in the social platforms for collective intelligence. Moreover, we will discuss the challenging issues involved in Social Computing in the context of theory and models of social networks, mining of spatial and temporal social information, ways to deal with partial and incomplete information in the social context, scalability and algorithmic issues with social computational techniques, and security & privacy issues. Some potential social computing applications for discussion would include collaborative filtering, query log processing, learning to rank, large graph and link algorithms, etc.

Presenter

Prof. Irwin King received the BSc degree in Engineering and Applied Science from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1984. He received his MSc and PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1988 and 1993 respectively. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993. His research interests include machine learning, web intelligence and social computing, and multimedia processing. In these research areas, Prof. King has published over 140 refereed journal (JMLR, ACM TOIS, IEEE TNN, IEEE BME, PR, IEEE SMC, JAMC, JASIST, IJPRAI, NN, etc.) and conference manuscripts (NIPS, CIKM, SIGIR, IJCNN, ICONIP, ICDAR, WWW, etc.). In addition, he has contributed over 20 book chapters and edited volumes. Moreover, Prof. King has over 30 research and applied grants. One notable system Prof. King has developed is the CUPIDE (Chinese University Plagiarism IDentification Engine) system, which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of text-based documents in both English and in Chinese to promote academic integrity and honesty.

Prof. King is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (TNN). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Open Information Systems Journal, Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Applied Mathematics, and Neural Information Processing Letters and Reviews Journal (NIP-LR). He has also served as Special Issue Guest Editor for Neurocomputing, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics (IJICC), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), and International Journal of Computational Intelligent Research (IJCIR). He is a member of ACM, IEEE Computer Society, International Neural Network Society (INNS), and Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). Currently, he is serving the Neural Network Technical Committee (NNTC) and the Data Mining Technical Committee under the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (formerly the IEEE Neural Network Society). He is also a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of the Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). He is serving or has served as program and/or organizing member in numerous top international conferences and workshops, e.g., WWW, ACM MM, CIKM, ICME, ICASSP, IJCNN, ICONIP, ICPR, etc. He has also served as reviewer for international conferences as well as journals, e.g., Information Fusion, IEEE TCAS, SIGMOD, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on System, Man, and Cybernetics, Machine Vision and Applications, International Journal of Computer Vision, Real-Time Imaging, SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artifcial Intelligence, etc.

Prof. King has received several exemplary teaching and service awards from the Department as well as from the Faculty of Engineering. He serves as a member of the Engineering Panel with the Research Grants Council (RGC), Hong Kong SAR Government. He is also the Director of the International Programmes in the Engineering Faculty. In addition, he is a member of the Faculty Curriculum Committee and serves as the Chair of the Curriculum Committee for the department. Prof. King is also actively involved in education of students outside of the classroom. For example, he has led several ACM Programming Contest Teams to the ACM ICPC World Finals since 2000. Moreover, he actively promotes the use of technologies in education. One great example is the Chinese University Plagiarism IDentifcation Engine (CUPIDE) Project, which is a system that promotes academic honesty and integrity through the use of advanced information retrieval techniques to locate similar texts. The CUPIDE system is being deployed at the Chinese University with over 14,000 student, faculty, and staff members. The system is also being used in a number of local secondary schools.