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Alvin Chin

Senior Researcher, Mobile Social Experiences Team, NRC Growth Economies Lab, Nokia Research Center
Beijing

Alvin Chin joined Nokia Research Center in Beijing as Member of Research Staff in July 2008 after completing his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and currently, he is now Senior Researcher. Alvin works in the Mobile Social Experiences Team which is part of the NRC Growth Economies Lab and Rich Context Modeling research.  His focus and his research involves examining how the mobile phone can be used for creating physical proximity social networks to capture and infer context for social activity and collaboration in real physical environments, and designing rich mobile social experiences to interact with others in an indoor environment as well as with other social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.  Alvin's research objective is to bring social awareness to pervasive computing systems and applications so that they become easier to use and can assist in our daily lives, by creating a mobile social networking framework and platform.  

His PhD work involved finding cohesive subgroups of people that are closely related to each other in their online interactions in social hypertext environments such as blogs, newsgroups and video conversations.  This can be used for finding experts within an online community and for labeling subgroups.  In his PhD thesis, he created a framework and method called Social Cohesion Analysis of Networks (SCAN) which involves analyzing conversations and uses social network analysis, clustering, and similarity.  Alvin has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and a Bachelors degree in Computer Engineering all from the University of Waterloo, Canada. 

Alvin also has research interests in creating recommendation systems based on social networks for example friend recommendations, and creating applications that use social networking for improving human-human communication and human-computer communication using mobile devices and the web.  His research is cross-disciplinary using techniques from social network analysis, sociology,computer science, data mining, psychology and human-computer interaction.

Alvin has worked in industry researching emerging technologies in the wireless and pervasive computing area, especially Bluetooth and 802.11 with Classwave Wireless and CGI Group Inc. in Toronto.   

In addition, Alvin is the organizer of the research seminar series at Nokia Research Center, Beijing that invites researchers from Nokia Research Center and other universities and industry labs to give research talks.  Interested researchers wishing to speak to Nokia Research Center in Beijing can contact Alvin to arrange a seminar date.  Alvin is an avid and passionate adopter and user of social computing and social media technologies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Plaxo Pulse) and blogs (although not often) at http://www.alvinychin.com/blog.  You can catch Alvin's updates on Facebook (alvin.chin@utoronto.ca), Twitter (gadgetman4u), LinkedIn (alvin.chin@nokia.com)  and Foursquare as well as connect to Alvin on Sina Weibo (gadgetman) in China. 

Professional Activities

2012

Industrial Track Chair, The 20th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS 2012), Macau, China, December 4-7, 2012.

Program Chair, The 5th IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2012), Besancon, France, September 12-14, 2012.

Industry Track Co-chair, 13th International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM 2012), Bengaluru, India, July 23-26, 2012

Program Committee Member, International Workshop on Social Computing, Networking and Services (SocialComNet 2012), Vancouver, Canada, June 26-28, 2012.

Publicity Chair, 23rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hypertext 2012), Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, June 25-28, 2012

Program Committee Member, The 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Trust and Identity in Mobile Internet, Computing and Communications (TrustID 2012), Liverpool, UK, June 25-27, 2012.

Paper Reviewer, The 10th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2012), Newcastle University, UK, June 18-22, 2012

Workshop Co-chair, The 2nd International Workshop on Sensing, Networking and Computing with Smartphones (PhoneCom 2012), co-located with IEEE ICDCS Conference 2012, Macau, China, June 18-21, 2012 (papers due January 31, 2012)

Program Commitee Member, The 1st International Workshop on Internet of Things (IoT-App 2012), Beijing, China, April 16, 2012

Paper Reviewer, International Conference on Social Computing, Behaviour-Cultural Modeling and Prediction (SBP 2012), University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, April 3-5, 2012

 

2011

Program Committee Member, IEEE International Workshop on Trust and Identity in Mobile Internet, Computing and Communications (TrustID 2011), Changsha, China, Nov. 16-18, 2011

Workshop Co-Chair, The 1st International Workshop on Sensing, Networking, and Computing with Smartphones (PhoneCom 2011), co-located with IEEE CPSCom 2011, Dalian, China, Oct. 19, 2011

Program Vice Chair and Workshop Chair, The 4th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2011), Dalian, China, Oct. 19-22, 2011

Workshop Co-Chair, The 2nd International Workshop on Modeling Social Media (MSM 2011), co-located with IEEE SocialCom, Boston, USA, Oct. 9, 2011

Program Committee Member, The 8th Interational Conference on Mobile Web and Information Systems (MobiWIS 2011), Niagara Falls, Canada, Sept. 19-21, 2011

Industrial Liaison Chair, The 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing (UIC 2011), Banff, Canada, Sept. 2-4, 2011

Program Commitee Member, Track 3 Social Media (Linking People and Things), ACM Hypertext 2011 Conference, Eindhoven, June 6-9, 2011

Paper Reviewer, Social Behaviour and Prediction Modeling Conference, Maryland, USA,  March 29-31, 2011

Paper Reviewer, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011), Hangzhou, China, March 18-23, 2011

 

2010

Committee member, Interaction and Interface, Multimedia and Computer Graphics Technical Committee, APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2010, Biopolis, Singapore, December 14-17, 2010.

Program Vice-Chair, 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2010), Hangzhou, China (Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2010)

Workshop Co-chair, Modeling Social Media, co-located with Hypertext 2010, Toronto, Canada (papers due April 9, 2010)

Demo Co-chair, ATC 2010 Conference, Xi'an, China (Call for demos due July 30, 2010 for inclusion into IEEE CS proceedings)

Program Committee Member, IEEE Social Computing 2010 Conference (papers due April 15, 2010), IEEE Social Computing 2009 Conference 

Program Committee Member and Publicity Chair, ACM Hypertext 2010 Conference, Toronto, Canada (June 13-16, 2010)

 

2009

 

Social Tools Coordinator, ACM Hypertext 2009 Conference, Turin, Italy

 

Current ongoing activities

Paper Reviewer, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), August 2011 to present

Associate Editor, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, July 2010 to present.

Paper Reviewer, IEEE Transactions in Mobile Computing (May 2009 - present)

Paper Reviewer, Behaviour and Information Technology (January 2009 - present)

Research seminar organizer, Nokia Research Center, Beijing, China (Feb 2009 - present)

Paper Reviewer, CHI  (Oct 2008 – present)

Paper Reviewer, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia (Sep 2008 – present)

Paper Reviewer, ACM Computing Review (Jan 2007 – present)

Paper Reviewer, UbiComp 2008 , 2011 (May 2008 - present).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Interests

Social computing, mobile social networking, computer-supported collaborative work, human-computer interaction, pervasive and mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, semantic web, and context awareness

Research Projects

My research projects deal with creating a UI and architecture framework for adding social network features around social interactions in physical places such as meeting rooms. I'm currently working on a research project for ephemeral social networking that deals with incorporating physical social interactions into mobile social networks in an indoor and outdoor environment, as well as looking at understanding social behaviour through encounter networks, finding subgroups, and improving friend recommendations.  One of the research prototypes that we have created is called Nokia Find & Connect  where we had trials at UIC/ATC 2010 conference, SXSW 2011 and Ubicomp 2012.  Please contact me for more information at alvin.chin AT nokia.com, download our papers, or follow our activity at Sina Weibo.  

Personal Information

My nickname is GadgetMan because of how I love gadgets and technology! 

 

Other Information

 

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Publications

2011 Publications

 

  1. Bin Xu, Alvin Chin, Hao Wang, Lele Chang, Ke Zhang, Fangxi Yin, Hao Wang, Li Zhang, "Physical Proximity and Online User Behavior in an Indoor Mobile Social Networking Application", In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2011), Dalian, China, Oct. 20-22, 2011 (Won Best Paper award)
  2. Bin Xu, Alvin Chin, Hao Wang and Hao Wang, "Using Physical Context in a Mobile Social Networking Application for Improving Friend Recommendations", 1st International Workshop on Sensing, Networking, and Computing with Smartphones (PhoneCom 2011), Dalian, China, Oct. 19, 2011
  3. Alvin Chin, Hao Wang, Lijun Zhu, Bin Xu and Hao Wang, "Connecting People through Physical Resources in an Office Environment", Accepted as Demo paper in Ubicomp 2011, Beijing, China, Sept. 19-21, 2011
  4. Bin Xu, Alvin Chin, Hao Wang, Hao Wang and Li Zhang, "Social Linking and Physical Proximity in a Mobile Location-based Service", Accepted to the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Location based Services (MLBS 2011), Ubicomp 2011, Beijing, China, Sept. 19, 2011
  5. Lele Chang, Alvin Chin, Hao Wang, Lijun Zhu, Ke Zhang, Fangxi Yin, Hao Wang, and Li Zhang, "Enhancing the Experience and Efficiency at a Conference with Mobile Social Networking: Case Study with Find & Connect", In Proc. of the International Conference on Human-centric Computing 2011 and Embedded and Multimedia Computing 2011, Enshi, China, Springer, August 11-13, 2011 (web site)
  6. H. Wang, A. Chin and H. Wang, "Social Influence on Being a Pay User in Freemium-based Social Networks", Accepted to the 25th International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Networks and Applications (AINA 2011), Biopolis, Singapore, 2011.
  7. H. Wang, A. Chin and H. Wang, "Interplay between Social Selection and Social Influence on Physical Proximity in Friendship Formation", 2nd International Workshop on Social Recommender Systems, The 2011 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011), Hangzhou, China, March 18, 2011.
     

2010 Publications

 

  1. H. Wang and A. Chin, "Evolution Analysis of a Mobile Social Network", Accepted to the 6th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA2010), Chongqing, China, 2010.
  2. A. Chin and H. Wang, "Using Cohesive Subgroups for Analyzing the Evolution of the Friend View Mobile Social Network", Accepted to Pervasive Social Computing track of Ubiquitous and Intelligent Computing conference (UIC 2010), Xi'an, China, 2010.
  3. L. Zhu, A. Chin, K. Zhang, W. Xu, H. Wang, and L. Zhang, "Managing Workplace Resources in Office Environments through Ephemeral Social Networks", Accepted to Pervasive Social Computing track of Ubiquitous and Intelligent Computing conference (UIC 2010), Xi'an, China, 2010.
  4. A. Chin and M. Chignell. "DISSECT: Data-Intensive Socially Similar Evolving Community Tracker", Book chapter in Computational Social Network Analysis: Trends, Tools and Research Advances, Computer Communications & Networks series, Springer-Verlag, London, 2010. 

2009 Publications

 

  1. A. Chin. "Finding Cohesive Subgroups and Relevant Members in the Nokia Friend View Mobile Social Network", Symposium of Social Intelligence and Networking, IEEE Social Computing Conference, Vancouver, Canada, 2009.
  2. A. Chin and J.P. Salomaa. "A User Study of Mobile Web Services and Applications from the 2008 Beijing Olympics", Hypertext 2009 Conference, Turin, Italy, 2009 (poster).

 

Journals

  1. A. Chin, M. Chignell and H. Wang. "Tracking cohesive subgroups over time in inferred social networks. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 2010. 16: 1, 113 — 139.
  2.  A. Chin, J. Keelan, V. Pavri-Garcia, G. Tomlinson, K. Wilson, and M. Chignell. "Automated Delineation of Subgroups in Web Video: A Medical Activism Case Study". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Special Issue on e-Health, 2010.
  3. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Automatic Detection of Cohesive Subgroups Within Social Hypertext: A Heuristic Approach”. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Taylor and Francis, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2008, 121-143. 
  4.  A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Identifying Communities in Blogs: Roles for Social Network Analysis and Survey Instruments”. International Journal of Web Based Communities (IJWBC). Inderscience Publishers, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2007, 343-365.

 

Conferences

  1. A. Chin and N. Ko. "Evaluation of Network Dynamics in the TakingITGlobal Community". Sunbelt Social Networking Conference, 2009.

  2. A. Chin. “Searching for Sense of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext”.  In Adjunct Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive 2007), Toronto, Canada, Vol. 219, 2007, 189-195.

  3.  V. Bellotti, J. Thornton, A. Chin, D. Schiano, and N. Good. “TV-ACTA: Embedding an Activity Centered Interface for Task Management in Email”. In Proceedings of the Conference for E-mail and Anti-Spam 2007 (CEAS 2007), Mountain View, CA, 2007, 10 pages [19% acceptance rate].

  4. A. Chin and M. Chignell.  “Identifying Active Subgroups within Online Communities”. In Proceedings of the 17th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies’ Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2007), Toronto, Canada, 2007, 280-283 [27% acceptance rate].
  5. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Identifying Subcommunities Using Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext”. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2007), Manchester, UK, 2007, 175-178 [29% acceptance rate].
  6.  A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Identifying Subcommunities Using Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext”. In Proceedings of the 18th International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2007), Manchester, UK, 2007, 175-178 [29% acceptance rate]. 
  7. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Investigating Evolution of Community in Blogs”.  International Sunbelt Social Networking Conference, Vancouver, Canada, Apr 2006.
  8.   

    A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Finding Evidence of Community From Blogging Co-Citations: A Social Network Analytic Approach”.  In Proceedings of IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2006 (WBC 2006), San Sebastian, Spain, 2006, 191-200.

  9. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “A Social Hypertext Model for Finding Community in Blogs”.  In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia: Tools for Supporting Social Structures (Hypertext 2006), Odense, Denmark, 2006, 11-22 [29% acceptance rate].

  10. A. Chin and K. Kontogiannis. “m-Roam: A Service Invocation and Roaming Framework for Pervasive Computing”, In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Network Applications (AINA 2004), Fukuoka, Japan, 2004, 385-392 [26% acceptance rate].

  11. A. Chin and K. Kontogiannis. “Context-Aware Service Provisioning”. Position paper,  Enterprise Application Integration Workshop, Software Technology and Engineering Practice International Conference (STEP 2003), Sep 2003. 

Workshops

 

  1. I. Mohomed, A. Chin, J. Cai and E. de Lara. “Community-Driven Adaptation: Automatic Content Adaptation in Pervasive Environments". In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing, Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004), English Lake District, UK, 2004, 124-133 [25% acceptance rate].
  2.  J. Su, A. Chin, A. Goel and E. de Lara. "User Mobility for Opportunistic Ad-Hoc Networking". In Proceedings of the 6th IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing, Systems and Applications  (WMCSA 2004), English Lake District, UK, 2004, 41-50 [25% acceptance rate].

 

Magazines

[11] M.V.A.Bonto-Kane, A. Chin, S. McCarthy, M. Srikulwong, and P.J. Timmins.“Pervasive 2007: It’s About the User”. IEEEPervasive Computing, Vol. 6. No. 4, 95-96, c3, Oct-Dec 2007.

Presentations

  1. A. Chin. "Finding and Connecting to People Through Ephemeral Social Networks". Invited speaker at 3rd International Workshop on Mobile Information Retrieval for the Future", NIST, Tokyo, Japan, Nov. 7, 2011.
  2. A. Chin. "Social Networking: Now and Beyond". Invited speaker at Nokia IT Infotainment Session, Nokia internal, December 2010.
  3. A. Chin. "Advances in Mobile Social Networks". Invited speaker at Mobile Monday Beijing #36, Orange Labs, Beijing, China, Aug. 30, 2010 (slides).
  4. A. Chin. "Finding and Connecting to the People that Matter the Most in Mobile Social Networks". Invited talk at National University of Singapore, Singapore, August 2010.
  5. A. Chin. "Advances in Mobile and Social Networking". Invited speaker at Social Networking Conference 2009, London, UK, Sept. 2009 (slides)
  6. A. Chin. “Nokia Mobile Web 2.0”. SphereConnect Fast Pitch, Nokia SphereConnect 2008, Nokia, Helsinki, Finland, Oct 2008 (one out of 12 selected to present out of 60 total submissions).

  7. A. Chin. “Finding Community in Social Networks”. Nokia Research Center, Beijing, China, April 2008.

  8. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Structural Analysis of Social Hypertext for Finding Sense of Community”. Bell University Labs Social Networking Symposium, Bell University Labs, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, Nov 2007.

  9. A. Chin. “Identifying Community in TorCamp “. DemoCamp15, TorCamp (Toronto-based chapter of BarCamp), Toronto, Canada, Oct 2007.

  10. A. Chin. “Inferring Community from Tagging”. Tagging as a Social Contract Workshop, 2nd Working Conference on Social Computing and Business, 17th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies’ Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2007), Toronto, Canada, Oct. 2007.
  11. A. Chin and M. Chignell. "Introduction and Results from the CASCON 2005 Business of Blogging Workshop". Social Computing Best Practices Workshop, 1st Working Conference on Social Computing and Business, 16th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies' Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2006), Toronto, Canada, Oct 2006.
  12. A. Chin, S. Chua, A. Xu and M. Chignell. “Building Communities Through Blogging”. Business of Blogging Workshop, 15th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies’ Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2005), Toronto, Canada, Oct 2005.
  13. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Building Communities Through Blogging”.  Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, Aug 2005.
  14. A. Chin. “Feedreading, RSS and Podcasting”.  Hands-on Workshop on the Latest Technologies, 15th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies’ Annual International Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2005), Toronto, Canada, Oct 2005.
  15.  A. Chin and K. Kontogiannis. “Service Invocation and Roaming”. Pervasive Computing Workshop, 12th and 13th IBM Centre for Advanced Studies’ Conference on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2002 and 2003), Toronto, Canada, Oct 2002 and 2003.