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BSc & Dip Eng.(Southampton); MSc (Warwick); PhD (Southampton); C.Eng.; C.ITP.; SrMACM; FBCS Research Interests: Information Retrieval, Data Structures and Algorithms, Pattern Recognition, Signal Processing, Natural Language Processing, Chinese Computing, Computational Linguistics |
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Robert is interested in information retrieval. In 2000, he was a visiting research scholar at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. He participated in the NTCIR open IR evaluation and TREC open IR evaluation using a search engine developed by his group. His search engine is being evaluated using terabyte collection at present as well as participating in TREC-COVID (Note that his participation involved only the base models without any clever tricks as this was done during Edward's spare time without any funding support). He worked and published in various aspects of information retrieval including indexing, retrieval models, term weighting, query expansion, active/relevance feedback, retrieval process, text categorization, spoken document retrieval, XML indexing and retrieval, string search algorithms, search interface and search evaluation. He served as a reviewer or program committee member of various conferences (e.g., ACM SIGIR, ICTIR, ACM CIKM, NLDB, AIRS, IEEE NLPKE, ACL RS Workshop and IJCNLP), and as a reviewer for journals (e.g., ACM TALIP, DKE, DSS, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE TEC, IEEE TKDE, IEEE TSMC, IJCPOL, IJCSSE, IJNS, IJTS, IJCA, IPM, ISci, JASIST, Neurocomputing and Pattern Recognition) and funding agencies (e.g., UGC). He is on various editorial (review) boards (e.g. IPM). Earlier, he helped to organize conferences (e.g., ISIMP 04 and WAIM 06). He was invited to deliver talks at the IBM Scientific Centre (Winchester), Hong Kong Digital 21 and HKG SIUF seminar. He spent his industrial internship at IBM Hursley, UK. He is an inventor of 8 US/PRC (search related) patents, some of which are licensed. He is a consultant for the Hong Kong Judiciary to develop a search system for bilingual judgements. His works (with his co-workers) have been cited in Wikipedia, books and research monographs (e.g., Connectionist models of memory and language, and Multilingual corpora in teaching and research). He is a recipient of various awards (e.g., technology transfer award, FENG research grant achievement award and Thomas Stephen prize for journal publication). He is listed in various bibliography publications (e.g., Marquis "Who is who" in Science and Engineering). Together with the Hong Kong Society for the Blind, he also jointly developed the world's first, Chinese screen reader (ASAB98) which was licensed to various companies and government organizations, and which was voted as an outstanding event by the Hong Kong Blind Union. He has his share of administrative duties, for example being a member of the Departmental Research Committee. He also takes his own initiatives, like acquiring new equipment (not just to be used for himself or his students, but others [some from another department] too). He has taught over 20 different subjects at postgraduate, undergraduate and sub-degree levels (e.g., information retrieval, financial computing, data structures and algorithms, etc.). His graduated students include Kelvin Hung (M.Phil.), W.S. Wong (M.Phil.), Edward Dang (Ph.D.) and Jack Wu (Ph.D.). He has also served as an external examiner for Ph.D. candidates of CUHK and HKUST. He is a senior member of the ACM (Life) and its SIGIR, and a chartered fellow of the BCS (Life) and its IRSG (affiliated member). Note that he believes that information retrieval [1] and computer science [2] are science (although this interesting MIT video says computer science is not science and it is not about computers, similarly echoed by this paper and by the lecture given by Nobel Laureate Feynman). |
| Selected Publications |
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