Research Seminar by Prof Raymond Chi-Wing Wong from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 30 Jul 2024, CCDS Meeting Room

Title: Finding Best Tuple via Interaction from Users with Errors

 

Abstract: In the literature of the database community, there are a lot of studies about finding a utility function from a user (representing the user's preference), via interaction with the user by asking a number of questions each requiring him/her to compare 2 points for choosing a more preferred point, in order to find the best tuple in the database containing a lot of tuples. In the real world, the user may make mistakes (carelessly), which means that s/he may answer some of the questions wrongly. Unfortunately, existing interaction algorithms may find the undesirable point based on the wrongly learnt utility function because they assume that all answers from the user are 100% correct. In particular, even if the user answers only 1 wrong answer, the output of the existing algorithms may be far away from the users' real need. Motivated by this, in this talk, we study the problem of finding the most interesting point via interaction which is robust to possible mistakes made by a user.

 

Bio: Raymond Chi-Wing Wong is a Professor in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is currently the associate head of Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). He was the associate director of the Data Science & Technology (DSCT) program (from 2019 to 2021), the director of the Risk Management and Business Intelligence (RMBI) program (from 2017 to 2019), the director of the Computer Engineering (CPEG) program (from 2014 to 2016) and the associate director of the Computer Engineering (CPEG) program (from 2012 to 2014). He received the BSc, MPhil and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2002, 2004 and 2008, respectively. In 2004-2005, he worked as a research and development assistant under an R&D project funded by ITF and a local industrial company called Lifewood. He received 42 awards. He published 123 conference papers (e.g., SIGMOD, SIGKDD, VLDB, ICDE and ICDM), 48 journal/chapter papers (e.g., TODS, DAMI, TKDE, VLDB journal and TKDD) and 1 book. He reviewed papers from conferences and journals related to data mining and database, including VLDB conference, SIGMOD, TODS, VLDB Journal, TKDE, TKDD, ICDE, SIGKDD, ICDM, DAMI, DaWaK, PAKDD, EDBT and IJDWM. He is a program committee member of conferences, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, KDD, ICDM and SDM, and a referee of journals, including TODS, VLDBJ, TKDE, TKDD, DAMI and KAIS. His research interests include database, data mining and artificial intelligence.