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Alvin Chin
Member of Research Staff, Mobile Social Networking Group
NRC Beijing
Contact

 

Alvin Chin recently 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.  At Nokia Research Center, Alvin is working on research on 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.  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 software architecture framework around social networks.

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, 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 currently 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.  Alvin is an avid and passionate adopter and user of social computing and social media technologies.  

 

 

Professional Activities

Program Committee Member, ACM Hypertext 2010 Conference, Toronto, Canada (July 2009 - present)

Program Committee Member, IEEE Social Computing 2009 Conference, Vancouver, Canada (August 2009)

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

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

Social Tools Coordinator, ACM Hypertext 2009 Conference, Turin, Italy (January 2009 - present)

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

Paper Reviewer, CHI 2008, 2009 (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 (May 2008).

Workshop Organizer and Co-chair, Tagging as a Social Contract Workshop, 2nd Working Conference on Social Computing and Business, CASCON 2007, Toronto, Canada (Oct 2007)

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Research Interests

Social computing, omputer-supported collaborative work, human-computer interaction, pervasive and mobile 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 called MSOMS which stands for Mobile Social Office Management System.
 

Personal Information

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

Publications

2009 Publications

 

  1. 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, 2009. [in press]
  2. 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 [in press].
  3. 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, 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, 2009 [in press].
  2. 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.
  3. 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”. IEEE Pervasive Computing, Vol. 6. No. 4, 95-96, c3, Oct-Dec 2007.

 

 

 

Presentations

  1. 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).

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

  3. 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.

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

  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. A. Chin and M. Chignell. “Building Communities Through Blogging”.  Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China, Aug 2005.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.

 

 

 
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