报告主题：Graph Data Science for Social Goods:  STAR Lab’s Experience

报告人：Reynold Cheng

报告时间：2025年11月16日 下午 02:00

报告地点：北京大学王选计算机研究所106报告厅

Abstract: In many metropolitan cities, there is a lack of manpower in social care. In Hong Kong, for example, the elderly care homes report a 70% shortage of employees. To alleviate these issues, recently there is a lot of attention on data science for social goods, or the use of technologies for enhancing service quality and streamlining administrative work of social workers. In this talk, I will discuss how the HKU STAR (Social Technology And Research) Lab uses data science technologies to support elderly and family care services. I will first introduce HINCare, a software platform that provides volunteering and cultivating mutual-help culture in the community. HINCare uses the HIN (Heterogeneous Information Network) to recommend helpers to elders or other service recipients, and is now supporting 14 NGOs and 7,000 users. I will also discuss our collaboration with the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust for developing a novel case management and data analysis system for 40% of the family care centers in Hong Kong. These projects have received 7 awards, including HKICT, Asia Smart App, and HKU Knowledge Exchange Awards.

Bio: Prof. Reynold Cheng is currently the Division Head and Professor (AI & Data Science), at the School of Computing and Data Science, in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is a Steering Committee Member of the HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science. He is an academic advisor to the College of Professional and Continuing Education of HKPU. He was an Associate Dean of Engineering in 2022-24. His research interests are in data science, big graph analytics and uncertain data management.

Professor Cheng is named the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Database in 2023 to 2025. He received the ACM Distinguished Membership Award and the HKU Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award in 2023. He was listed as the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University in 2022.  He received the SIGMOD Research Highlights Reward 2020, HKICT Awards (2021, 2023), HKU Knowledge Exchange Award (2024), HKU Engineering Knowledge Exchange Award (2024, 2021), and HKU Engineering Best Teaching Award (2023, 2024), and HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2011-12. He received the Universitas 21 Fellowship in 2011, and two HKPU Computing Performance Awards in 2006 and 2007.  He was a PC co-chair of IEEE ICDE 2021. He is on the editorial board of PVLDB, ACM TSAS, IS, DAPD, and DSEJ.