Graph Data Science for Social Good: support for elder care

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.

Speaker Bio:

Professor Reynold Cheng is a Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Associate Dean of Engineering of HKU. He is also an academic advisor to the College of Professional and Continuing Education of HKPU. His research interests are in data science, big graph analytics and uncertain data management. He received his BEng (Computer Engineering) in 1998 and MPhil in 2000 from HKU. He then obtained his MSc and PhD degrees from Department of Computer Science of Purdue University in 2003 and 2005.

Professor Cheng 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, and is named the 2024 and 2023 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Database. He received the SIGMOD Research Highlights Reward 2020, HKICT Awards 2021 and 2023, and HKU Knowledge Exchange Award (Engineering) 2021. He was granted an Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2011-12 by HKU. He received the Universitas 21 Fellowship in 2011, and two Performance Awards from HKPU Computing in 2006 and 2007. He is a member of IEEE, ACM, ACM SIGMOD, and UPE. He was a PC co-chair of IEEE ICDE 2021, and has been serving on the program committees and review panels for leading database conferences and journals like SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, KDD, IJCAI, AAAI, and TODS. He is on the editorial board of KAIS, IS and DAPD, and was a former editorial board member of TKDE.