Alvin Chin
Member of Research Staff
Mobile Social Networking Group
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Research
Member of
Research Staff,
July 2008 to present
My research at
PhD research:
Evaluating Virtual Community in Social Hypertext
May 2005 to November 2008
My PhD research
is concerned with the problem of evaluating the formation of cohesive subgroups
in online collaborative environments.
Methods are needed to explore and capture patterns of activities within
these environments. I create a method
called the SCAN method that identifies members by detecting subgroups as
structures for finding evidence of community using clustering analysis, network
centrality, and similarity. These subgroups are validated using research
results from sociology and psychology concerning how communities and social
networks grow and function. Several quantitative measures of community such as
the Sense of Community Index and Social Network Questionnaire are used. Using
these measures I create an evaluation framework which was applied to blogs,
online groups, and video sharing sites to determine community building
properties. My research has been
published in Web-based Communities
2006 conference, Sunbelt
Social Networking Conference 2006, Hypertext
2006 conference, International
Journal of Web-Based Communities 2007, Doctoral Colloquium at the
Pervasive 2007 conference, Hypertext
2007 conference, CASCON 2007
conference, and the New
Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia journal.
Web Video
2.0: Dynamic Metadata Indexing of Web Video Content
January 2007 to July 2008, Funded by Bell University Labs
In partnership
with Bell Canada and Bell University Labs, this research
determines a methodology for distributing user generated video content
intelligently to the consumer on the appropriate connected media device. The purpose of this research is to study the
behaviour and social interactions that occur when video is shared among a group
of individuals on the Internet using independent film artists and vaccination
groups, and then create methods for indexing and classification of video that
enable automatic tagging and richer tagging of video. In addition, this research aims to create
user interfaces for better browsing and retrieval of video, create better tools
for editing and annotating of existing videos, and use social network analysis
to intelligently determine how video should be distributed among an
individual’s social networks. This research has been presented as a poster at
the CASCON 2007 conference, and as a presentation at the
Bell University Labs Social Network/ing Symposium 2007.
Task
Management and Complexity in E-mail
May 2006 to August 2006
My work at PARC with Victoria
Bellotti involves task management and managing complexity of tasks related
to e-mail. A task-based management
interface has been created to assist people with managing e-mail. This project is related to the e-mail as habitat project. This research has been published in the Conference on E-mail and Anti-Spam 2007.
Finding
Community and Social Networks in Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Calls
January 2006 to April 2006, Funded by Bell University Labs
This research
investigated the complex interactions that occur between young adults with
essentially unlimited access to voice communications within their social
networks using VoIP. This project will carry out an extensive research trial
with a relatively large number of undergraduate students aged 18 to 21,
providing definitive findings concerning the use and viability of inexpensive
and extensive voice interaction. This scientific research will also focus on
the impact of rich voice interaction on the development of community and social
networks, which is an important area of current scientific interest that links
together the theoretical basis for and impact of a range of new
telecommunications technologies such as VoIP conferencing and blogging.
Building
Communities Through Blogging
May 2005 to present, Funded by Bell University Labs
My PhD research is
concerned with the problem of evaluating and measuring the formation of
community in blogs. "Community" is a broad term that has been used in
a number of ways. It is not clear that definitions of community based on
physical community also apply to virtual communities. These methods are needed
to identify and measure the different senses of virtual community that
exist. I will create a framework that
identifies communities in blogs and uses them to evaluate community in
blogs. This research has been published
in Web-based Communities 2006
conference, Sunbelt Social
Networking Conference 2006, Hypertext
2006 conference, and the International
Journal of Web-Based Communities 2007.
I have helped to create and maintain the following blogs for my
research: Interactive Media
Lab research blog, CASCON
conference blog, Planet
IML blog, and How
About That Melody Indie music blog.
Adaptive
Stream-based Editing for Collaboration on
November 2004 to April 2005
Current mobile
devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cell phones, support
viewing multimedia streaming content such as video. However, this multimedia
content is typically read-only which does not allow users to modify that
content for personal use or for sharing with others. The problem is that there
is little support and incentive for editing streaming content on mobile
devices. We propose a framework and protocol for authoring multimedia streams
that enables collaboration on mobile devices using adaptation, semantic
content, and synchronization protocols.
Community-based
Content Adaptation project
September 2003 to September 2004, Funded
by Bell University Labs
Mobile devices,
such as mobile phones and hand-held computers, are limited in bandwidth. High quality images take lots of time to
download on these devices. At present, content needs to be written specifically
for each target device. In addition,
users have different perception as to how they view images, what may be
considered good quality for one may not be for the other. Our research intends to investigate the
feasibility of adapting images and content to an optimal fidelity that will
provide for a personal rich interaction experience for a community of users.
The research
will involve a usability study where each participant will be asked to perform
specific tasks on three different Internet applications. The user finds the appropriate image and then
improves the fidelity of that image, until the task is accomplished. This research has been presented as a poster at the MobiSys 2004
conference and as a paper at the 6th
IEEE Workshop on Mobile Computing, Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004),
User Mobility
in Ad-Hoc networks project
September 2003 to September 2004
This research
examines whether it is possible to construct a communication network based on fortuitous
pair-wise contacts between mobile wireless nodes. The underlying hypothesis behind this project
is that there is regularity in node movements, and that knowledge of movement
patterns can be used to improve network efficiency. To test this hypothesis, we outfitted a group
of 20 graduate students with Bluetooth-enabled Palm devices. The Palm devices
constantly scan the environment for Bluetooth devices and keep a log of their
encounters. The intent is to demonstrate
that patterns in user mobility can be discovered and leveraged to improve
routing decisions, quality of service, and performance in ad-hoc networks. This research has been published as a paper at the 6th IEEE
Workshop on Mobile Computing, Systems and Applications (WMCSA 2004).
Copyright © 2002-2009 by Alvin Y.C. Chin. All rights
reserved.
This page was last
updated June 16, 2009