Professor Ming-Syan Chen

Professor Ming-Syan Chen

Director, Research Center for Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Title: Information Processing in Social Networks

In the current social network, a user may have hundreds of friends and find it very time consuming to categorize and tag every friend manually. When a user is going to initiate an activity by issuing a corresponding query, he/she needs to consider the relationship among candidate attendees to find a group of mutually close friends. Meanwhile, he/she also needs to consider the schedule of candidate
attendees to find an activity period available for all attendees. It would certainly be desirable if the efficiency of such process is improved. In this talk, information query in social networks will be reviewed. We shall also introduce a novel social visualization system, SocFeedViewer, which is able to automatically cluster friends
based on the number of mutual acquaintances and then systematically shows the social information, thus allowing users of having a whole picture quickly. When a user decides to initiate an activity among a cluster of friends, the user can further issue a Social-Temporal Group Query (STGQ), and the proposed algorithm STGSelect will return a group of attendees with minimum total social distance, together with a suitable time period which is available for all attendees. The STGQ is known to be an NP-hard problem; however, STGSelect is still able to find the optimal answer efficiently and reduce considerable processing time with proposed strategies.

Short Bio

Ming-Syan Chen (陳銘憲) received the B.S. degree in electrical
engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, and the
M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer, Information and Control
Engineering from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, in
1985 and 1988, respectively. He is now a Distinguished Research Fellow and the Director of Research Center of Information Technology Innovation (CITI) in the Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and is also a Distinguished Professor jointly appointed by EE Department, CSIE Department, and Graduate Institute of Communication Eng. (GICE) at National Taiwan University. He was a research staff member at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA from 1988 to 1996, the Director of GICE from 2003 to 2006, and also the President/CEO of Institute for Information Industry (III), which is one of the largest organizations for information technology in Taiwan, from 2007 to 2008. His research interests include databases, data mining, cloud computing, and multimedia networking, and he has published more than 300 papers in his research areas.

In addition to serving as program chairs/vice-chairs and keynote/tutorial speakers in many international conferences, Dr. Chen was an associate editor of IEEE TKDE, VLDB Journal, KAIS, and also JISE, is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Electrical Engineering (IJEE), and is a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE
Computer Society for Asia-Pacific from 1998 to 2000, and also from
2005 to 2007. Dr. Chen is now also serving as the Chief Executive
Officer of Networked Communication Program, which is a national
program coordinating several primary activities in information and
communication technologies in Taiwan. He holds, or has applied for,
eighteen U.S. patents and seven ROC patents in his research areas. He is a recipient of the Academic Award of the Ministry of Eduation, the NSC (National Science Council) Distinguished Research Award, Pan Wen Yuan Distinguished Research Award, Teco Award, Honorary Medal of Information, and K.-T. Li Research Breakthrough Award for his research work, and also the Outstanding Innovation Award from IBM Corporate for his contribution to a major database product. He was also elected as a Chair Professor by National Chung Hsing University. He received numerous awards for his research, teaching, inventions and patent applications. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of ACM and a Fellow of IEEE.