Topic: Data Science for Social Goods: STAR Lab’s Experience

Speaker: Reynold Cheng, Professor, The University of Hong Kong

Host: Chenhao MA, Assistant Professor, School of Data Science, CUHK-Shenzhen

Date: 17 November (Friday), 2023

Time: 14:30 - 15:30, Beijing Time

Format: Hybrid

Venue: Room 101, Cheng Dao Building

SDS视频号直播：

Language: English

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 an HKICT Award, Asia Smart App Awards, and HKU Faculty Knowledge Exchange Awards.

Biography：

Reynold Cheng is a Professor of the Department of Computer Science, an Associate Dean of Engineering, and an Associate Director of the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His research interests are in data science, big graph analytics and uncertain data management. He was the Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU) from 2005 to 2008. He received his BEng (Computer Engineering) in 1998, and MPhil (Computer Science and Information Systems) in 2000 from HKU. He then obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from Department of Computer Science of Purdue University in 2003 and 2005.