Any data-driven organisation will need to develop a unified data environment to leverage analytics to drive its digital transformation in a complex system of data services, platforms, models, standards, and governance.  The ICT industry has provided rudimentary platforms to enable this journey but fails to deliver on the golden promises.  This presentation will look at the maturity of the Data Lake phenomena and what lies ahead with the move to more semantically-enabled Data Hubs.

We are starting to reach the limit of size and speed of conventional computers. Quantum computing takes place in the sub-microscopic domain of individual atoms. This largely non-technical talk will explain how computing takes place in the quantum domain and we will explore the potential of quantum computers. The talk starts with an overview of quantum phenomena and how they can be used to process data much faster than present-day computers. No familiarity with quantum mechanics is presumed for this talk. Some understanding of how computers work would be helpful.

Managers often have information that they want reflected when training predictive models from data.  A popular method for doing this is with business rules.  These rules are meant to capture managerial knowledge and insights that impose important constraints on decision problems like setting the optimal price. Traditional approaches to price optimization take a two-step approach to setting prices. First a sales response model is specified and the parameters are estimated given an observed dataset.  Second this model is used for inference to make decisions about the optimal price. Often the optimal pricing solutions from the estimated sales response model are nonsense suggesting prices that are unfairly high, which leads the manager to impose a set of post hoc constraints on the feasible price space to find a more appropriate solution.  We argue that manager’s constraints on the price solution represent prior information about the model.  We show that incorporating this information post hoc instead of a priori leads to inefficient pricing decisions.  To facilitate the creation of the model and its prior we show how constraints implied by business rules and statements about optimal prices can be translated into informative prior distributions.  These prior distributions appropriately weigh the managerial knowledge against the data unlike the traditional approach.  In summary, our approach improves the quality of the pricing decisions made by managers and offers a consistent and scientific approach for incorporating managerial expertise into the pricing problem.

Over the decades to come, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are set to change the world as we know it, ushering an era in which cars drive themselves, robots assist us across increasingly diverse tasks, and vast amounts of data are mined to manage traffic, reduce pollution, improve public health, reduce crime, and much more. Many of these predicted changes assume the collection and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal data. Some have suggested that it is inevitable for these changes to lead to the end of privacy.

In this lecture, I will discuss what privacy is, discuss its many different facets and how some regulatory requirements attempt to protect us from practices that threaten to erode our expectations of privacy, including recent regulations such as the European General Protection Regulation (GDPR). I will discuss how both Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things are making privacy particularly challenging, and how these same technologies also offer the promise of solutions that could ultimately help protect people’s privacy. This presentation is based on research my group and I have been conducting at Carnegie Mellon University over the past decade, including practical tools and technologies we are already piloting today.

Hardly a day goes by without a news story addressing cryptocurrency e.g., bitcoin, ether, and its underlying blockchain technology.  The majority of this coverage tends to reinforce existing popular notions that such currencies facilitate criminal activity and financial scams, provide a mechanism for quick monetary gain (or loss) or define the foundation for a new global digital economy.  Blockchain is most often portrayed not only as the platform for cryptocurrencies, but as one of the most disruptive technologies since the birth of the Internet itself.

What are less often discussed are the opportunities that cryptocurrency and blockchain are capable of providing to under-served or disenfranchised communities.  Individuals who do not qualify for nor have access to traditional banking services are being empowered by the availability of cryptocurrency.  Blockchain technology is being deployed by civil society groups to make transactions fully transparent, thereby achieving end-to-end traceability.  Such traceability can be used to combat global abuses such as human trafficking and the conflict diamond trade.

This talk will not be a description of the technologies behind cryptocurrencies and blockchain but rather an explanation of their diverse potential to effect social change.  It will also pose a challenge to the practitioners and players in this powerful space of new opportunities that could be pursued to raise the public profile of these powerful technologies.

This largely non-technical talk will explain today’s trends in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  In particular, we will explore the concept of “deep learning” by neural networks, which allows AI systems to detect patterns in data on their own without requiring human guidance.  We will present several deployed applications of deep learning, such as medical diagnosis, image recognition, speech recognition and self-driving cars.

From voice activating our calendar with Siri, navigating to our meetings with Waze, avoiding accidents with automatic braking and getting our lab and scanning results analyzed at the doctor’s office, AI (artificial intelligence) is already part of our everyday lives.

What is the impact and economic value of all of these enhanced products and services to the global economy?  Is AI-- the products, services, data, analytics, software, algorithms—a positive sum or zero sum game (Man vs. Machine) for the countries, businesses and people of the world?

According to a 2017 PWC report given at the World Economic Forum, AI will add $16 Trillion to the global economy by 2030.  Not surprisingly, the two main drivers of value will be labor productivity and enhanced products and services in the Healthcare, Automotive, Financial Services, Logistics and Technology/Telecom/Media industries.

The big surprise is that the new game-changing AI "rules" for success will give China as a region the largest positive GDP impact--$7 Trillion—the most of any country or region and 50% of the total value generated by 2030.

In this talk, we will look at:

• The new game-changing AI "rules" for success and determining factors for winners and losers.
• The innovative AI business models used by the global multinational leaders in the Self-Driving Car sector.
• A Global Dynamic Capabilities Framework for AI-readiness company assessment.
• What’s Next—the top rated AI startups in 2017 in the categories of "most disruptive", "social innovation" and "hottest emerging sectors".

The age of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (LOD) has the potential to create a new breed of information system that delivers enhanced data features to a wider audience of users.  The emerging LOD datasets are driving this, but are focussed on data, rather than semantics.  The capability of LOD can be greatly enhanced when modelling principles from the semantic web are followed, thus enabling greater sharing of knowledge and machine-reasoning potential.

This talk will discuss how LOD teams can look at semantic modelling principles, the reuse of vocabularies, and plan for linkages to their data.  The outcome will be an enterprise-ready LOD solution that can more actively participate in the LOD global ecosystem.

A large and growing body of research shows that consumers' often develop "mental accounts" that correspond to personal financial categories they consider relevant, but which do not correspond to actual financial accounts.  These mental accounts can explain what may seem like irrational behavior to economists, such as having both large savings balances with little interest earnings and large credit card balances with high interest costs, or why consumers spend more when they use credit cards than cash or debit cards.  Consumers internally use these mental accounts is to better manage their finances, but the mental accounting process often reduces fungibility and leads consumers to be inefficient, or even suboptimal, in the way they invest their time and money.  Our study develops an econometric model that estimates mental accounting using financial transactional data.  We find that consumers fall more towards bounded models that incorporate mental accounting than unbounded rational economic models.  We conclude with potential consequences for innovations on consumer financial services.

The Internet of Things is expected to lead to an explosion in devices and services developed by a myriad of providers.  This diversity has the potential of making security and privacy even more challenging than they are today. Just like mobile app developers, IoT providers can be expected to often be inexperienced and lack the awareness and sophistication necessary to protect the security and privacy of their end users.  To make matters worse, these devices and services will often be deployed and managed by equally unsophisticated users, who, in contrast to professional system administrators, will often misconfigure them and open the door to a number of vulnerabilities.  The consequences could be dramatic, from massive DDOS attacks such as those that brought down many sites in October 2016, to the hacking of critical everyday objects such as your car or pacemaker, or the breach of critical elements of our infrastructure.

In this presentation, Prof Sadeh will draw on parallels with mobile app stores to illustrate possible approaches to mitigating risks in the Internet of Things.  The presentation will draw on examples from research conducted in my research group at Carnegie Mellon University.

The development and public acceptance of driverless cars has been very rapid.  Twenty driverless Uber cars now regularly offer rides in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh.  The implications of autonomous vehicles are profound, from public safety to commuting, delivery of goods and automobile insurance.  But how do driverless cars work, and are they trustworthy?  In this largely non-technical talk we will take a look under the hood and review the amazing components of a driverless vehicle.  Videos showing how a driverless car sees its environment are included.

Pocket Monsters, animated Japanese characters are popping up everywhere - in 92+ countries and 550 million smartphones.  Millions of Pokemon Go players and their smartphones have walked 4.6Billion kilometers in search of Pikachu and 150 other well-loved Pokemon characters.

Join Professor Shuen to find out why Pokemon Go matters to strategy and innovation.

The free-to-play augmented reality game generates $10M in in-app revenue/day and is 2016's best example of a $12B digital transformation.  Learn how smartphone apps have changed the economics of strategy and innovation, accelerating the path from digital startup to "unicorn", $1B+ private companies.  The lightning-fast, huge success of Pokemon Go shows combinatorial innovation at Niantic Labs, digital innovation at Google and exponential innovation at Nintendo.  Best of all, a free-to-play game has brought millions of new customers and foot traffic to local businesses, municipalities, art museums, parks and public venues all around the world. Gotta Catch em All!

Digital contracts are mechanisms to express the terms and conditions for digital content usage.  Many attempts in the past have struggled with proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) infrastructure to assure content and rights information are transparently transacted.  Digital permissions can also support Privacy and other policy assertions related to usage of digital data where no enforcement is desirable.  With the emergence of HTML5 and Encrypted Media Extensions, we can envisage a truly open DRM system with digital contracts.

This presentation will provide an overview of the past and present work in digital rights, and the emerging W3C permission expression language (ODRL).  It will also cover the potential disruption with contract data becoming a part of the BlockChain infrastructure to support independently verifiable rights transactions.

Prediction underlies most decisions and range from precise numerical forecasts generated by predictive analytical models to qualitative statements made about upcoming events.  For example, businesses need to be able to predict sales in order to efficiently allocate production resources, scientists want to predict climate change, city officials need to anticipate traffic backups, and consumers routinely make decisions about unknown products like whether they purchase a new movie.  In other words prediction is ubiquitous and necessary.  Unfortunately, most managers are ill equipped to predict key events or numbers, having neither the technical skills nor the right mindset.  Perhaps the most common mistake is overconfidence.  The challenge is that many predictions are made with limited data available and are made without the help of a systematic methodology.

In this seminar we consider some examples of prediction and recent research about the psychology of prediction and empirical findings about good forecasters.  The findings show that forecasters can overcome their biases and make predictions not only in data rich environments but also ones that are data poor.  Some suggestions for improving predictions are updating predictions frequently, using "baselines", learning from mistakes, providing probabilistic not deterministic predictions, avoiding the use of ideological beliefs as the basis for predictions, and combining multiple and potentially disparate sources of information.

The global market for smartphones is huge - more than 1.4 billion are sold every year - just about the population of China. Samsung leads the market with about a 20% share. Apple is #2 at about 14%, but this varies considerably each year. Apple owns patents covering some of the most fundamental user gestures, such as pinching to reduce the size of an image and two-finger scrolling. Samsung has patents of its own. The patent fight between the giants is fierce, and has extended to courtrooms in the U.S., Korea, Europe, Australia and Japan, involving billions of USD in claims. This talk will present the main technical issues behind this worldwide battle.

The global market for smartphones is huge - more than 1.4 billion are sold every year - just about the population of China. Samsung leads the market with about a 20% share. Apple is #2 at about 14%, but this varies considerably each year. Apple owns patents covering some of the most fundamental user gestures, such as pinching to reduce the size of an image and two-finger scrolling. Samsung has patents of its own. The patent fight between the giants is fierce, and has extended to courtrooms in the U.S., Korea, Europe, Australia and Japan, involving billions of USD in claims. This talk will present the main technical issues behind this worldwide battle.

In recent months there have been heated discussions about unregulated services that make use of apps for services involving travel in private cars (Uber) or overnight stays in private homes (AirBnB).

Those in favour of these new services argue that change is inevitable. Those against them raise a variety of arguments: lack of customer guarantees or safety and unfair competition.

The issue is whether start-ups that launch innovative apps have to stay within the existing regulatory framework or can offer apps that work outside existing regulation?

One field that appears to be less controversial is health and wellness. But if we scratch the surface, the same conflicts can be found. What do we do in cases like this?

A great deal depends on size, on 'mice' and 'elephants'. If the organisation is a resource-rich company the strategic options for innovation are very different from those open to small startups with limited resources.

Apple and Samsung both have toolkits and R&D programmes to help grow the app market in this field.

The presentation makes use of recent cases that include solutions for 

• persons with serious hearing impairments
• individuals who have had a heart attack and are undergoing rehabilitation
• persons with atrial fibrillation and
• COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

The presentation uses a variety of strategy tools including stakeholder analysis, business ecosystem analysis and the LEAN approach to business model development.

Nanotechnology has already made a big impact in materials and electronics, but new breakthroughs in nanomedicine and molecular-sized pharmaceuticals promise to have a transformative impact on life sciences and the fight against cancer.  This is straight out of the movies, as you will see.

Why attend this talk
Join HKU Professor Amy Shuen on her Fantastic Voyage into the cancer nanomedicine world.  As an Entrepreneurship professor-turned Biotech-CEO, Amy jump-started her faculty-co-founded Nanoforma, a preclinical UCSF-Berkeley-Stanford nanomedicine startup with the latest in business model practices, the *Life Sciences Lean Launchpad method.  This method reinvents translational research, bridging the gap between basic research and the clinic, enabling a better and faster bench to bedside transition.

The top U.S. science research funding agency, NIH-the National Institutes of Health--invested $30B in 2015.  Last year, they developed the *Life Sciences Lean Launchpad program (with best-selling author Steve Blank) to train over 500 teams of researchers on translating their inventions and breakthroughs into commercial success-faster and with less money.

Instead of a formal but potentially flawed Business Plan, the Lean Startup process uses a one-page draft Business Model Canvas that is continually revised and updated.  All initial business ideas or hypotheses about---who are the customers, why will they buy and at what price, what is the product and value proposition, are there key influencers, partners and channels-are systematically tested by scientific researchers themselves.  They "get out of the building" and talk to many experts.  Each team builds an incredible network and ecosystem along the way, by talking to at least 70 experts in 7 weeks' time.

The emergence of services like Uber and AirBnB have more than just disrupted the traditional industries in which they serve. Traditional Knowledge Management together with Enterprise Information Architecture now have a new kid on the block to push the value of information assets. This talk will look at the relationship between the traditional knowledge/information paradigms and the knowledge economy and proposes the beginning of the collective intelligence economy.

We are presently on the verge of an exciting new chapter in the Information Age. This chapter will be characterized by three disruptive technologies influencing how data is generated, distributed, and analyzed and by a struggle over how these technologies can be effectively managed and used. The technologies involved in this revolution are Big Data, Data Science, and the "Internet of Things (IOT)". Individually these fields have stirred great interest, but together they promise to change forever the ways we communicate, live our lives, conduct business, and acquire knowledge. This talk will explore both the potential and the pitfalls that need to be addressed in preparation for this convergence.

In 2012, U.S. consumers paid $32 billion in overdraft fees, which represent the single largest source of revenue for banks from demand deposit accounts during this period. Owing to consumer attrition caused by high overdraft fees and potential government regulations to reform these fees, financial institutions have become motivated to investigate their overdraft fee structures. Banks need to balance the revenue generated from overdraft fees with consumer dissatisfaction and potential churn caused by overdraft fees.

In this research, we propose an economic, dynamic structural model with consumer monitoring costs and dissatisfaction associated with overdraft fees. We find that consumers heavily discount the future and potentially overdraw because of impulsive spending. However, we also find that high monitoring costs hinder consumers' effort to track their balance accurately; consequently, consumers may overdraw because of rational inattention. We apply the model to an enterprise-level dataset of more than 500,000 accounts with a history of 450 days, providing a total of 200 million transactions. This large dataset is necessary because of the infrequent nature of overdrafts; however, it also engenders computational challenges, which we address by using parallel computing techniques. Our policy simulations show that alternative pricing strategies may increase bank revenue.

More important, by leveraging consumer transaction histories, banks can send targeted and dynamic alerts, which can not only help consumers avoid overdraft fees but also increase bank revenue because of higher interchange fees resulting from continued consumer spending and reduced consumer attrition.

With the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and a data-centric economy, where a growing number of AI-based products, services and business processes rely on the collection and processing of user data, people are increasingly confronted with an unmanageable number of privacy decisions. While there is ample evidence that people care about their privacy, research shows that they are simply overwhelmed by the amount of information they would have to read and settings they are expected to configure (e.g., mobile app settings, Facebook settings, smart home settings). In effect, people feel helpless. What is needed is a new, more scalable paradigm that empowers users to regain control over their data.

While many people have depicted Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as threats to our privacy, we believe that these very same technologies may also hold the key to empowering users to regain control over their data. In this presentation, I will summarize recent results of ongoing research at Carnegie Mellon University in this area. This will include work conducted in what is possibly the largest national research project in privacy in the US, where we have been combining crowdsourcing, machine learning and natural language processing to semi-automatically extract key information from website privacy policies. This also includes research where we have used machine learning to build models of people's privacy preferences. I will further discuss how, by combining these advances with user-centered design principles, we are hoping to develop a novel family of personalized privacy assistants capable of analyzing many privacy policies and configuring many privacy setting on our behalf as we interact with an ever larger number of IoT applications, services and devices.

Electronic devices are so small and cheap and network bandwidth so plentiful that we can connect almost every object on Earth to the Internet.  A typical smartphone now has 14 different sensors and communication channels.  Connected consumer products like thermostats and smart refrigerators are now available, but the real benefit will come from smart homes, vehicles, factories and cities.  When devices talk to each other without human involvement, many conveniences and services become possible. In this talk we will examine the technology behind the Internet of Everything, sometimes called the Internet of Things, and discuss business and societal implications.

It's true. In Asia, the ten top mega-cities-population over 10M-are the designers and creators of most of the GDP and new private enterprise wealth. This is in stark contrast to the mega-cities in Latin America and India, where a toxic combination of population growth, slums, unemployment, poor social services and infrastructure has lowered the per capita productivity to new lows.

How do Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo practice "accelerated design innovation"?

This wide ranging talk and video montage will

• compare best practices at Creativity Inc, Steve Jobs' Pixar campus with the newly designed Oriental Dreamworks in Shanghai and D'Hive Media City in Songjiang
• explain why millennials are moving to San Francisco and leaving the surburban sprawl of Silicon Valley behind
• show some of the fascinating 3D video walk-throughs and master-plans of the smart mega-cities of the future

It is intriguing to think of the Web as the world's greatest library. Combined with their favourite search engine, facts on every conceivable topic are readily available to the user. Therein lies a problem - access to facts does not mean access to knowledge. The majority of data on the Web is unstructured and uncorrelated containing little information about relationships. It's those relationships that contain knowledge.

Linked Open Data (LOD) supports the publication of structured and semantic data on the Web that can be interlinked to establish relationships. Such relationships allow a clear and unambiguous understanding of the content. Machine-processable LOD enables rich searching, efficient data mining, and creative data mashups, i.e., the support of knowledge generation. The implications of LOD are profound in such areas as education, business, and open government.

In this talk Bebo will describe the LOD framework, how it operates, and why any institution generating free and public data should consider publishing it as Linked Open Data.

The promise of Big Data is that it can solve business problems using massive datasets. For example, social media data is used by marketers to measure the "buzz" associated with a product and predict its success in the marketplace. The focus of most research today is to develop new methods for using Big Data. We begin the presentation by discussing some of the promise of using Big Data for solving business problems, but then proceed to consider some limitations and kinds of problems for which Big Data is not suited.

In particular we present two case studies in finance and marketing to illustrate the limitations of Big Data. Our financial case study is drawn from banking which uses Big Data to predict loan default. We show that having good predictions is not enough, since regulators require knowledge about the risk of the model in adverse economic conditions. This case study illustrates the idea that we cannot just evaluate models on how well they have worked in the past, but we need to assess how certain that they will work in the future. Our marketing case study considers how managers can use massive retail datasets about past consumer purchases to set optimal prices, but must integrate managerial insight to make these models perform well.

Our conclusion is that Big Data is a rich source of information but to find the best solutions to business problems we need to integrate economic and managerial knowledge.

Over 100 billion mobile apps were downloaded in 2013, generating around 26 billion US dollars in revenue. As the Android and iOS ecosystems compete for both developers and end-users, they are continuing to increase the number of APIs they make accessible to developers. While these APIs have opened the door to new families of mobile apps such as new health and fitness apps and a slew of social networking apps, they are also enabling 3rd parties such as advertising networks and analytics companies to collect unprecedented amounts of information about us.

This presentation will summarize key findings from several years of research at Carnegie Mellon University, looking at data collection and sharing practices of mobile apps. I will present results that highlight how little people understand about these practices and their reactions when they find out. I will also review the types of settings made available to users both in iOS and Android when it comes to controlling their information and show why they are inadequate. Finally, I will discuss recent results that offer the promise of empowering users to better control these settings and discuss how these results could also be turned into tools that help mobile app developers.

The health sector creates and manages significant amounts of information about people used to record patient encounters and decisions about healthcare treatments. The adoption of ICT for healthcare has lead to a proliferation of eHealth standards to address these critical information management requirements.

The objective of this seminar is to understand the current state of eHealth information technologies and the future directions for clinical decision support. It will cover the core clinical modeling, terminology, and information concepts that drive the development of International eHealth standards (such as HL7, SNOMED) and will discuss real use cases in National eHealth Record Systems. The outcomes of this seminar include the ability to understand the concepts of eHealth information standard approaches and how they can drive improved health outcomes through their adoption.

Bitcoin is a digital currency not regulated or even controlled by any country or organization. Transactions are managed and verified by open source software run by thousands of participants worldwide. For these reasons, it has captured the imagination of futurists but raised concern among governments over possible use in crime and terrorist financing and loss of leverage over money supplies. In 2013, the PRC restricted its banks from transacting in Bitcoin, but the U.S. has taken no such steps.

Bitcoin cannot be ignored, with about 10 billion HKD now in circulation. The value of one Bitcoin rose from 35 HKD in 2012 to about 7400 HKD now - a factor of 200 in two years. Hong Kong is a growing center of Bitcoin activity.

In this talk we explain in non-technical terms how Bitcoin works and what its risks and benefits are. The material is based on the speaker's course on Electronic Payment Systems currently in progress at the University of Hong Kong.

For the last 2-3 years, out-of-school learning has been revitalized by smartphones and tablets. They are demonstrating their worth as "Personal Computers" in a way that the desktop PC never did. One of the reasons for this is that they are truly personal devices.

Coupled with the ascendance of social media like Facebook, Twitter and look-alikes at global and national level, apps are becoming a force to inform, educate and entertain.

In some cases, apps are designed as stand-alone experiences. In others, they are designed to enhance an experience on a main screen or even a live event at a performing arts venue.

What kind of design framework helps us come up with second-screen apps that work? Using inputs from video ethnography and audience research across Europe, this presentation provides some evidence-based pointers about the incorporation of social interaction and participation into app design and the selection of appropriate metrics to help decide what's hot and what's not.

Background reading:
Looms, Peter Olaf (2013). TV in the 21st century one screen or two? http://rthk.hk/mediadigest/20130205_76_122955.html

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have soared in popularity and been described as the "disruptive innovation" that promises to revolutionize higher education. The head of a new consortium of Harvard and MIT has referred to the concept as "the most important educational technology in 200 years." John Hennessy, the President of Stanford University, has been quoted as saying "there's a tsunami coming." All agree that there are fundamental changes ahead for online education and traditional teaching and learning. The early success of MOOCs has, quite naturally, triggered entrepreneurship with companies offering to provide the resources and services for their implementation. A number of these entrepreneurs come from the very educational institutions whose "status quo" may most be affected by MOOCs. In this talk Bebo will provide an overview of the MOOC phenomenon and a report on the status of MOOCs with their successes and failures.

As a senior executive or industry professional with more than 5 years since your MBA, Master's or PhD, you often find yourself asking what really drives growth and competitive advantage in next-generation competition - and why tried and true business models and once-successful strategy tools are no longer enough. General business books and press provide insights, glimpses and tantalizing clues of something big happening...

You'd like to have a better working understanding of the new business models that have transformed industries in our highly-connected world and how to use Web economics and strategies to best advantage.

It's time to catch up on the highlights of five years of economic research on the fundamental, make-or-break network, social and digital economic drivers that we now know as critical to the Web's ability to catalyze industry transformation and disrupt complacent strategies and competitive advantage. You will know the answers to:

1. What does the Web, crowds, smartphone markets, social graphs, game theory and Big Data have in common?
2. What business model is behind the profitability of LinkedIn, Facebook, GE and Harrah's casino empire?
3. Did Google, eBay, United's Sabre Systems or Bloomberg figure out the dynamic pricing strategy that generates the most auctions per day with the highest return?
4. What did IBM and Whirlpool do to spark innovation and entrepreneurship in their top 25,000 managers worldwide resulting in several new $1B businesses in less than 3 years?
5. How do companies big and small "monetize" their off-book digital capital and what are the simple steps you can take to assess the portfolio value of your company's digital and social "Rembrandts in the Attic"?

The 2010 US census cost over 13 billion US dollars and involved hiring close to 600,000 people. Yet the information it gives us is a frozen snapshot of the population. What if we could harness the massive amounts of public social media data generated every day and build, at a fraction of the cost, a deeper, more dynamic understanding of what is happening in our cities? Norman Sadeh, a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a visiting Professor at HKU, reflects on his work and that of his collaborators on Livehoods, a site that automatically generates urban maps highlighting the social dynamics of cities. The Livehoods project is about developing a new layer of information reflecting the social dimensions of our urban interactions. Norman will share his vision for how this new layer of information can help inform urban planning decisions, public health questions, all the way to business decisions such as where to open a new store or how to provide mobile users with effective everyday life recommendations.

Google doesn't answer questions. It may point you to a web page that contains an answer, but it does not even know you're asking a question. IBM's Watson system does answer questions. Designed to beat humans at the stylized question-answering game Jeopardy! Watson uses a powerful parallel computer that stores information from the Internet equivalent to 1 million books. The language processing component of Watson was built at Carnegie Mellon University. IBM is now using Watson to provide health information to doctors. This talk, which is oriented toward a non-technical audience, will explain how a computer can answer sophisticated questions in less than three seconds.

Many observers have written off TV as a 20th century medium with little relevance in this one. But is TV really dead?

Take the case of NOW TV. Some viewers still watch TV at home and use a remote control to select what they want to see. One of the trends is that the TV experience is becoming increasingly a cinema-like, immersive one - High Definition, 3D images and compelling, surround sound. At the same time, a recent study by TNS suggests that in Hong Kong the average citizen has nearly 2 mobiles (conventional phones, smartphones and tablets). Here the mantra is convenience - 'anything, anytime, anywhere and on any device'. Has TV become superfluous in a world of mobiles?

Using examples from around the world, the lecture looks at the audience research on the drivers behind TV use. It examines Over The Top (OTT) TV and how the delivery of content via the Internet  - on one big screen or to handheld devices - is changing consumer behaviour and influencing the business models that underpin media.

The lecture concludes with mention of the role of standards - will they promote or impede market take-up in a converging world?

We'll start by looking at the latest advances of tumor-targeted nano-pharmaceuticals, 10x more effective in Phase III of human trials in the Fight Against Cancer. These clinical results are game-changing and have intensified the global race between top research groups in the US, Europe and Asia to capture the already $5B market in nanomedicine and dominate in the estimated $70B future market in nano-biopharmaceuticals and services.

Will the supercomputer technology of CFD, computational fluid dynamics, applied to personalizing and "engineering" the mechanisms of drug delivery play a key role in determining the winners and losers of the global race? Or will mastering the new "virtual biotech" business models for funding and accelerating the new nanobiotech medical startups be the key of nano-medicine success?

Winning the Fight Against Cancer means effectively integrating the innovation and scientific expertise of nano-researchers with the drug pipeline, $$$, clinical trials and distribution of large pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) is an ambitious project to delivery digital healthcare for all consumers n Australia The PCEHR went live in Australia on the 1st July 2012 with a predicted 500,000 consumers opting-ing by the end of 2013. The PCEHR was designed by NEHTA based on extensive consumer and healthcare provider input and consultation. The PCEHR represents a significant advance towards protecting consumer privacy and supporting the sharing of clinical documents to relevant healthcare providers. The PCEHR was designed to be flexible and support new clinical services over time, for example, Medication Lists Summaries from dispense records. The PCEHR also supports direct clinical systems interactions and third-party consumer portals. This presentation will provide an overview of the PCEHR, focussing on the services and information models required to support eHealth national infrastructure.

The World Wide Web has proven to be an invaluable collaboration tool in the physical, biological, and social sciences. The unique aspects of the Web have led to the definition of its own branch of science. Web Science has become a recognized research area and numerous universities have added its study to their curriculum.

"Web Science embraces the study of the Web as a vast information network of people and communities. It also includes the study of people and communities using the digital records of user activity mediated by the Web. An understanding of human behavior and social interaction can contribute to our understanding of the Web, and data obtained from the Web can contribute to our understanding of human behavior and social interaction." [ACM Web Science conference site] Web Science has been described as "studying the online world to understand the offline world."

Several years ago Bebo White gave a HKU Expert Address to provide an introduction to the concepts of Web Science. In this address he will provide an evaluation of the state of Web Science and discuss some of the diverse and fascinating results that Web Science researchers have discovered.

Customers have always had the ability to talk amongst themselves, but electronic social networks foster and encourage this communication at a level and a frequency that is greater than traditional methods. Social networks provide new possibilities for dialogue between the company and the customer as well as customer to customer communication. First, we consider several practical examples of how social networks can influence the marketing process. Second, we consider the theoretical problem of how social networks impact consumer purchases. Specifically, there are two competing explanations about how social networks can influence consumers: homophily and social influence. Homophily refers to the similarity in product preferences between friends, while social influence is the dependence of consumers' purchase decisions on their communication with others. We find that homophily and social influence are both present, but have different impacts on what consumers buy versus when the products are purchased. To illustrate this problem we consider an empirical analysis of the purchase of cellular phone services.

Smart phones and tablets are rapidly establishing themselves as indispensable tools for a growing segment of the workforce. In the process, they are also forcing organizations to revisit many of their security policies and to confront difficult tradeoffs between productivity and security. Mobile devices also make it particularly easy and tempting for users to break across security boundaries. Our research shows that while users have been quick to adopt many of the new usage scenarios and applications that come along with these devices, their understanding of vulnerabilities associated with them remains rather limited.

This presentation will review some of the main security vulnerabilities associated with poor end-user decisions and discuss the types of strategies and best practices one can realistically hope to teach everyday smart phone users. One obvious challenge in this area is to determine how much users can effectively be expected to learn and to what extent security policies and technologies can realistically make up for those areas where training may be impractical or insufficient. A related challenge has to do with the diversity of devices, technologies and environments, the wide variety of usage scenarios mediated by smart phones today and the many vulnerabilities they entail.

The second part of this presentation will introduce a set of learning science principles and training tools we have developed to help train users to adopt safer smart phone practices. This will include a discussion of how we have prioritized learning objectives and designed training tools to focus on these objectives.

The presentation will include results from research conducted by the speaker at the Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon University as well as work conducted at Wombat Security Technologies.

In 1991, Yale University professor David Gelernter wrote a book called "Mirror Worlds", in which he showed how all the world's information could be accessed from a single computer screen. He obtained three patents on the technology described in the book. One of his innovations was the "swiping" metaphor now universally used on smartphones (like the iPhone) in which a finger can be "swiped" over the screen to cause content to scroll. In 2010, Gelernter won a jury verdict of over 6 billion HKD against Apple for patent infringement. The judge in the case had the option of increasing the award to more than 19 billion HKD. Instead, with his signature, the judge reduced the amount to zero. In this talk we will explore the human story behind these events and the interplay between technology and the legal system.

Earlier this year, the world population reached 7 billion. Various estimates suggest that at least 700 million of them would not be able to enjoy watching TV or use a mobile phone, even if they could afford it. Why is this so?

This lecture addresses the nature of the accessibility challenge - which persons are at risk of bring excluded? Using examples from around the world, it then looks at the usability and accessibility options - what can be done to make digital media accessible?

The lecture then reviews of the commercial, moral and legal arguments for digital media accessibility and the regulatory options to make change happen.

The lecture concludes with mention of the work of the International Telecommunications Union, (ITU - a United Nations agency) to make digital media accessible.

Professor Amy Shuen will share her perspective on the following challenges faced by the mobile industry. Come hear about the trends, startups and game-changing business models in the areas of:

1. Big Data - Massive bits of data are being generated online by Web 2.0 UGC (User generated content), social and sensor networks, e-commerce, mobile location, advertising. What can you do with Big Data to put it to good use - putting Fast Data, Big Analytics & Deep Insight into the hands of those who need it, while they work and when they need it.

2. Social mobile identity standards - who owns access to user identity? Facebook, Amazon, Apple, mobile operators, carriers, merchants, publishers and handset, device makers are part owners.

3. New mobile payments and commerce - what will users trust? NFC, mobile billing, Paypal?

4. Mobile economy - what will be the next billion dollar opportunity? Virtual goods, location, ads?

5. Smarter Cities, Smarter Planet - what role will your mobile phone have?

In the not too distant future our perception of what composes the physical Web is going to change. Far more devices and objects will become "first-class citizens" of the Web and communicate via Web protocols. It is critical for us to prepare for this 'Web of Things' and understand how to use Web standards to interconnect all varieties of embedded devices (sensors, mobile telephones, personal and home appliances, etc.) in order to make them easier to use, operate seamlessly with other components of the Web, and be available to existing Web applications.

Location-based services (LBS) are the collection of data and technology that drive popular applications such as in-car navigation, mapping of nearby points of interest on cell phones, automatic notification of weather hazards as they impact travel along a highway route, location-based advertising, geosocial networking, and tracking of inventory in warehouses. These applications leverage the user's or object's physical location to locate and access additional relevant information. LBS is enabled by the nexus of the Internet, wireless and geospatial technology realms. While geospatial technology is perhaps the least understood of these, geospatial content and services comprise the majority of the value component in LBS. This address will explore some of the key issues in the use of geospatial content on mobile devices and in LBS in general.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Over the past few years, the explosion in smart phone ownership has also given rise to a slew of mobile applications. Many of these applications collect information about the location of their users, some to enhance their functionality, others purely for the purpose of serving ads and profiling their users. Most recently, it was revealed that Apple, Google and Microsoft all collected location information of device owners but had failed to effectively disclose their practice.

This presentation will provide an overview of mobile location privacy, why it is important and how practices in this area have drastically changed over the past couple of years. This will include looking at the commercial forces at play, different ways in which information is collected today as well as existing legal and regulatory provisions in this space. Part of this lecture will also include the presentation of results from a first in-depth study comparing location privacy attitudes in the US and mainland China.

This talk is intended to move away from the sometimes simplistic views aired in the press on this subject. Instead, it will leverage results of many years of research at Carnegie Mellon and aim to paint a more balanced view of what is going on. This includes explaining why location privacy is a particularly challenging area and also a forerunner of many more privacy debates to come.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Facebook was founded in 2004. In September 2010, with over 500 million members, it overtook Google as the most popular U.S. website, occupying almost 10% of users' time online and valued at HKD 400 billion. In the same month, Google, worth four times as much, surpassed 1 billion global users, and their battle became fully joined.

Facebook is currently engaged in three wars: (1) a prolonged legal conflict over the very origins of the company, partially dramatized in the movie The Social Network; (2) the race for Web popularity with Google; and (3) its quest to become the most exciting technology employer.

Facebook fights these wars on a daily basis. They involve a complex interaction among technology, law, executive recruiting, public opinion and even international politics. This talk will focus on Facebook's dominance strategy and the lawsuit brought against it by CEO Mark Zuckerberg's fellow students from Harvard University.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Who decides what the main news stories are on the Web? When you buy a smartphone, do you as a consumer have full control over which apps you can download and buy? And when you buy a modern flat panel display to watch TV, who decides what you can see on the receiver? The answers to these questions may surprise you, as they are all related to gatekeeping.

The metaphor of gatekeeping conjures up images of old walled cities and a gate - sometimes more than one - built into the wall so that access to and from the city could be controlled. Gatekeeping also exists in the 21st century in a less physical sense. It is a key process that influences the passage of information and media all the way from their creation to use by consumers.

Using examples from digital media such as television, the Web and apps on smartphones, the speaker will explain what gatekeeping is, how gatekeeping has become a mechanism that influences the way in which consumers and providers of digital media interact with each other and what implications gatekeeping has for the workings of our society.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Is it time for Web 3.0 - or is Web 2.0 Strategy still making innovative inroads in emerging areas of healthcare, government and smart planet? This talk will focus on the key trends emerging for the next five years of Web 2.0 strategy - since business, consumer and social networking companies and applications worldwide have been given a huge boost by smartphones and mobile apps beyond the iPhone; virtual people, goods and games making real money in the cloud for small and big businesses; and new business models figuring out how to monetize and dynamically price real-time sensor information for new knowledge services for healthcare, government and smart planet.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

The most convenient model of the World Wide Web is that of a network of interconnected documents and applications. Despite the success of the Web, this model suggests that data be constrained within pages or via simple database queries. Such a document-centric Web is convenient for human browsing, but difficult for machine processing. Alternatively, concepts of Linked Open Data (LOD) suggest that the Web can also be perceived as a globally distributed data space - the Web of Data. Such a Web would support structured, SQL-like queries that could offer interesting opportunities for the next generation of Web-based applications. Data from different providers may be aggregated easily; fragmentary information from multiple sources may be integrated to achieve a more complete view. LOD builds upon the Semantic Web vision that has been discussed for so many years. The talk will describe the basic principles of LOD and give powerful examples of how it is currently being used.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Piracy of digital media products has long been a focus of research, but the effect of piracy on sales of legitimate products is inconclusive.

Most studies look at simultaneous or post-release piracies, which make it hard to draw causal inference. The movie industry is also an important topic to marketing and economics researchers. However, few studies exist on piracy of movies. In this study, we analyze the effect of pre-release movie piracy on box office sales. Using data collected from a unique Internet file-sharing site, we find that pre-release piracy reduces movie's market potential, although movies with pre-release piracy exhibit slower sales decline over time. We estimate that the net effect of pre-release piracy is approximately a 15% reduction in box office sales.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Over the past two years, the state of the mobile world has been drastically reshaped with the emergence of a dizzying array of applications available for download on the Apple App Store and competing ecosystems such as Android Market. In this talk, I will discuss several emerging trends that can be expected to significantly disrupt these environments as we know them today, from an explosion in the types of devices and appliances we can be expected to interact with, to ways in which applications will be able to tap into an ever wider range of contextual information. A key element of this transformation will see these environments expose increasingly sophisticated levels of interoperability to application developers. As this happens, they will move away from just supporting siloed applications and create opportunities for significantly richer functionality where applications can be dynamically composed in support of more sophisticated usage scenarios. Clearly, this will not happen overnight. Instead, I will review challenges that remain to be addressed for some elements of this vision to fully materialize and discuss progress towards getting there.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Recent technological innovations have shaken the world of publishing. In October 2009, Google announced that it had scanned over 10 million books as part of its Google Books project and plans to add at least 5 million more, giving a total that would make Google one of the ten largest libraries in the world. A critical difference between Google and a traditional library is that all of its content can be search by keyword and materials can be viewed online.

Google has also provoked critical reaction from authors and publishers from around the world, particularly China, for its practice of scanning copyrighted material without permission. Continuing lawsuits have forced Google to propose a sweeping settlement with copyright owners.

Another development has been the rapid rise of e-book viewers such as the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. This in turn has given rise to an increase in copyright piracy because of the ease with which electronic books can be transmitted.

In this talk we will examine these phenomena and see that (1) piracy is an important factor in lowering the price of digitized books; and (2) the combined effect of technological innovation will be to reduce the useful lifetime of traditional libraries to years or decades rather than centuries.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Perhaps not since the invention of the Web itself has a technology generated the public attention that Cloud Computing has done in the last year. It has been estimated that over 80% of Internet users, whether they are aware of it or not, are currently storing data or using applications that reside "in the cloud." There remain many misconceptions about Cloud Computing - what it is, how it might change the perception of computing, issues of security and privacy, etc. In this talk we will "clear the air" about what Cloud Computing really means, discuss the status of the technology and if it is something that the IT world needs to take seriously and plan for.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Does inclusive design always lead to boring ICT products and services? Isn't it too expensive to think of usability and inclusiveness? Can we afford to comply with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities?

The i Phone is just one good example that designing with and for users leads to commercially attractive products. It demonstrates that inclusive design is a reality, not utopia.

Using examples of information and communication technologies ranging from smart phones to digital television and video-on-demand services on the Web, the speaker will talk about the nature of social and functional disabilities and how usability and participatory design can come up with products that are attractive, useful and commercial viable.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Social Networks have been a world-wide phenomenon and their proliferation poses a pressing interoperability and usability challenge to both web users and service providers. Web users have different social networks accounts and utilise them in different ways depending on the context. For example, more friendly chat on FaceBook, more professional on LinkedIn, and a bit daring interaction on Hi5.

Maintaining these multiple online profiles is cumbersome and time consuming and locks in the web user to a service provider. Also, sharing information and user-generated content is particularly challenging due to the obscure nature of privacy and rights management on social networks and the lack of awareness and transparency of such policies. The W3C Social Web Incubator Group (XG) has been investigating these challenges with the purpose to define a number of new standards that can address the needs of the social web users and balance the needs from the servicer providers. This talk will look at the social profile portability needs and the policy (privacy and rights) directions needed to break down the "walled gardens" of social networks.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Increasingly users are expected to configure a variety of security and privacy policies on their own, whether it's the firewall on their home computer, their privacy preferences on Facebook, or access control policies at work. In practice, research shows that users often have great difficulty specifying such policies. This in turn can result in significant vulnerabilities.

In this presentation, I will provide an overview of findings from research conducted over the past several years in the area of user-controllable security and privacy. Our work, which has been conducted through the deployment and evaluation of a series of mobile location sharing applications, combines user studies with the development of novel policy authoring and auditing technologies aimed at mitigating the gap between what application developers expect users to be able to do and what users show us they can actually do. In the process, I will also discuss what we have learned when it comes to better understanding users' privacy preferences when it comes to sharing their locations with others.

• Organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

A goal of experimental mathematics is to discover mathematical truths that can be turned into theorems. This talk describes a particular computer-based method that has yielded hundreds of new discoveries over several areas of mathematics, including combinatorics and number theory.

The technique is based on a large computer catalog of real numbers formed by evaluating to 20 decimal places expressions arising in various fields of mathematics. The catalog, which took ten years to construct, now contains about 10,000 entries and almost 30,000 expressions. In essence it is a hash table in which expressions collide if their decimal fractions share the same first 20 digits. Collision of expressions in the catalog suggests (but does not prove) that they are equal. The catalog strongly exhibits the first digit phenomenon.

Mining the catalog produces some unexpected and beautiful results that least naturally to new mathematical investigations. For example, suppose that f(n) counts the number of natural numbers ≤ n that possess a certain property (e.g., the number of primes not exceeding n). A general technique will be given for evaluating sums of the form where f is of the preceding form and g is a given function. Other new results will be presented from analysis, number theory and combinatorics, such as an expression for the number of ways n(k) that a natural number k can be expressed as a power of natural numbers.

Familiarity with elementary calculus and combinatorics is sufficient background for this talk.

For almost two decades the World Wide Web has been largely described in terms of the technologies, infrastructure, processes, and methods that define it and the applications it supports. In contrast, the emerging discipline of Web Science seeks to understand the phenomenon that is the Web as an independent entity and the ecology in which it exists. In addition, Web Science explores the roles and the impact that the Web has had and will continue to have in the 21st century. As a result, studies in Web Science will help us to understand how the technology might evolve and how we can be prepared for the future Web.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

The design of IT systems and digital media has made considerable advances over the last decade. Usability and participatory design are two reasons for this. In a number of countries, there is increasing focus on assistive technologies and accessibility.

But to what extent do we design IT to be truly inclusive, so that users regardless of age or sensory capacity can make full use of them?

In this presentation, the speaker will focus on a number of key terms to do with inclusive design, outline the main challenges facing work of this kind and suggest approaches that can be followed to move from exclusion to e-inclusiveness. The presentation will draw on examples from the DTV4ALL project to produce a pan-European e-inclusiveness strategy for digital television, and the International Telecommunications Union G3ict Toolkit Project for policy-makers.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

In January 2008, it was reported that the Hong Kong Exchange was seriously considering the introduction of carbon emissions trading.

Carbon trading schemes are inevitably electronically supported. They have attracted investors, and much speculative discussion in the trade press, but almost no serious consideration in the eCommerce literature. This presentation provides a preliminary examination of the nature of carbon trading, from the perspective of electronic commerce theory and practice.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Experience Science Management deploys time-tested theories and uncommon principles in a structured approach for experience design and innovation, and measures touch-points' effectiveness in driving

i) Positive Emotions: X-MOT (Moments Of Truth @ Experience)
ii) Brand Differentiation: MOD (Moments Of Differentiation)
iii) Buying Behavior: MOB (Moments Of Buying)

Two United States patent-pending methodologies, the Branded CEM Method and the X-VOC Research Method, synergize each other to create an effective and branded experience to your target customers.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Understanding user needs and requirements for the effective design of an information system is a far more complex challenge than we generally recognize. Much of the difficulties may be due to cognitive biases, including functional fixedness by both users and developers. In this seminar, I will examine the sources of these biases and explain why these challenges are particularly daunting for achieving integrated information systems, especially in China today.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Many consumers begin their purchase process at search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN instead of traditional retailers. Consumers rely upon the search results provided by these engines along with paid advertising to make decisions about what sites to visit and subsequently which products to purchase. In this study we propose a statistical model that predicts consumer search and the probability of purchase using clickstream data collected from an online sample of consumers. A challenge in analyzing this data is the textual nature of the search strings and the scarcity of many search terms. We also consider how consumers will search based upon the specificity of the search term.

This model is cast in the context of a hierarchical Bayesian model to overcome the limited information for many search strings and consumers.  We illustrate how this model can be used to aid advertisers in making decisions about how much to bid, what phrase to bid upon, and the appropriate landing page for the consumer once they enter the web site.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

The term "phishing" refers to cyber-attacks where someone masquerades as a legitimate entity (e.g. website, colleague) to fraudulently obtain sensitive information such as passwords, credit card numbers, or critical intellectual property. It is a form of social engineering that takes advantage of people's general gullibility as well as lack of understanding of how email, the Web and other technologies really work - what is legitimate and what can easily be spoofed. Today phishing comes in the form of fraudulent emails, websites, instant messages or even VoIP calls. The past several years have seen a steady rise in attacks, with direct financial losses estimated to range between $350m and $3b per year. But for corporations and government organizations this is just the tip of the iceberg, as more targeted (aka "spear phishing") attacks can lead to potentially devastating breaches.

While in principle technologies such as PKI could help eliminate phishing, evidence suggests that this will not happen anytime soon. Instead, what is required is a multi-pronged approach that combines effective filtering techniques with new approaches to training users to recognize these attacks. In this presentation, several particularly promising techniques will be presented that have been developed and piloted at Carnegie Mellon University over the past several years in the context of what is probably the largest US research effort in this area.

This is joint work by the presenter and several of his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, including Lorrie Cranor, Jason Hong, Alessandro Acquisti, Julie Downs, Sven Dietrich, Anthony Tomasic and a number of graduate students.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

In recent years, various experts have forecast the imminent demise of television. Claims are made about young people who no longer watch television, the shift from watching broadcast TV to on-demand, the ascendance of social media sites such as You Tube along with the decline of television advertising as a sustainable business model. In addition to all this, there is the mobile phone and alternatives to television on what is becoming the most ubiquitous IT device on the planet.

In this address, the speaker will examine the evidence from markets around the world, attempt to separate reality from hype and come up with some conclusions about the future of television.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Wikipedia defines computational science (not computer science) as "the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical solution techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific and engineering problems." What this definition fails to express is how computational science has become an integral component of all scientific disciplines and how it promises to fundamentally change the way in which science will be done in the future. The impact of computational science can only be likened to how the execution of scientific research was changed by the elaboration of the Scientific Method. This lecture will describe the elements of computational science and engineering and research methods that take advantage of these elements. Case studies will be presented to illustrate applications of these methods.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE

Corporations need to innovate just to survive, but many corporations are bad at innovation and by objective measure are getting worse. Innovation, even when it occurs, is often not rewarded either by increases in profit or in stock price. Some truly innovative developments, such as the Iridium satellite phone network, have been colossal and expensive failures.

We will look at situations in which innovation has paid off and those in which it has merely provided inspiration to competitors. Surprisingly, research shows that when innovation succeeds, it can produce huge rewards (e.g. Google) or none at all (3M Corporation), but rarely yields only moderate gains. We will explode some myths, particularly that of the first mover advantage and the notion that encouraging entrepreneurship within a company has any effect on innovation.

This talk argues that innovation is a manageable discipline through which success can be made probable and expensive failure avoided by applying straightforward but unforgiving Darwinian principles.

• Jointly organized by The MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office & Technology Transfer Office

Web 2.0 has captured the mind and market-share of the Web Community.

What it is really undefined, but that has not stopped its rapid adoption. This spreading of the "social web" is probably unstoppable and moving to other sectors like "Security 2.0" and "Enterprise 2.0".

The presentation will try to deconstruct the Web 2.0 phenomena and looks at the real challenges of the future web. One in which interoperability of data, semantics, and policy will be the driving force.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE.

From the very beginning of the first wave of Internet commerce in the late 1990s, Internet payment mechanisms were a serious impediment to adoption. Many approaches have been tried, but almost all payments depend on credit cards - a scheme that was inherently flawed when it was launched in 'meatspace' and sits very uncomfortably in the fixed-connection / PC / wired era.

The current wave of eCommerce is mobile / handheld / wireless. People expect to do everything quickly, simply and intuitively. It appears that many categories of modern consumers have a cavalier attitude to risk even when making payments, and particularly when making frequent payments of relatively small sums of money.

This presentation highlights the risks that consumers face, and asks whether the perception of riskiness will impede the adoption of MCommerce.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE.

A news headline on Hong Kong television on 12 June was that foreign business organizations in China now prefer to engage local Chinese graduates instead of relying on exported talents from Hong Kong. Is Hong Kong losing its strategic advantage? What will be the future trend for IT/IS outsourcing? How should Hong Kong develop its human resources in the IT/IS area?

We invite graduates and current students of the Programme, business organization staff, and interested public, to take part in this interactive seminar. If you have business dealings with China, you are most welcome to discuss and share your experience. Together, we will explore new directions and solutions.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office & HKU SPACE.

This presentation will focus on the role of Open Source Development in Web-based applications and discuss the close interaction between Open Source methodologies, tools, and platforms and the construction of modern Web applications and services. Open source concepts, methods and projects reinforce interoperability and open standards in the practical implementation of all future Web protocols, data formats, and applications. Some of the important ongoing Open Source projects involving Web technology will also be described.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Web Analytics Association (United States) and GCCRM (Greater China) collaborated a research study on [Online Customer Experience in Mainland China], to dig out the online experience from an experience-centric rather than the traditional process-centric or efficiency-centric angle.

This study is not only important for what it reveals about Mainland China surfing habits, but is important for what it is measuring - online experience.

A company's brand is made up of how people feel about it. A company website has as much or more impact on how people feel than a face-to-face meeting. Taking this bold step to quantify what online elements have the biggest impact on people moves us closer to customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and competitive advantage. These results show us the way to create one of those sites that customers "mostly love".

13 popular eCommerce web sites have been researched including eBay and Taobao. A total of 2,013 valid responses are obtained.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Most university degree programs do not prepare students for employment. Employers are looking for skills, not book learning, and skills cannot be acquired by attending lectures. If that is true, then exactly why do we insist that students attend classes?

This talk describes a new approach to professional education in which no classes are given. Two complete degree programs at Carnegie Mellon are offered this way: eBusiness Technologies and Software Engineering. In the eBusiness program, students work in team on realistic problems in an environment that closely models real employment in a consulting company. They produce professional work product for 16 problems over a 10-month period. The problems span the field of eBusiness technology. They must learn not only the technology underlying each problem but the meta-skills of team organization, time management, task delegation and oral persuasion.

The talk will outline how the degree program functions, how students are evaluated individually for what is essentially team accomplishment, grading issues and the benefits and drawbacks of this mode of education.

• Organized by: HKU Steering Committee on 4-Year Undergraduate Curriculum, MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme Office and Centre for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT)

The greatest challenge the Web faces today is to capitalise on the efforts that have gone on previously in the development of specific policy languages - and to build the next layers of infrastructure to support a policy-aware web. This will transform the web from an information delivery system into an information management system that will meet the emerging needs of the web community. In particular, it will address communities that have based their professional and societal life on the functions and structure of the web - and are now looking for greater infrastructure support for common services. Just like HTML, the web now needs reliable structures for policy management.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Building on its search-engine service, Google Inc. has developed additional business lines, generated new forms of revenue-stream, and deployed many experimental new services. The company's innovations have enjoyed varying degrees of success, but they add up to something rather different from the mainstream.

This presentation outlines Google's many lines of intersecting businesses, commencing with the content-discovery cluster, moving onto the content services cluster, and culminating in the accumulation of data about Google's users. They have considerable economic and legal implications.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

The launch of 3G services around the world brought with it the promise of video, sound and other audiovisual services accessible on handheld devices. Now they are joined by IP datacast that allows for a plethora of "push" services to be delivered to such devices so that 3G can be used for on-demand and billing for services.

Vying for attention are competing standards for IP datacast: the European DVB-H, Korea's DMB, the Japanese ISBDN and Qualcomm's MediaFlo.

What do consumers want? Where and when do they use such services? In the standards war, which of them is going to survive? And most importantly, is there a sustainable business model underpinning such services?

This address offers a critical review of some of the findings of IP datacast trials and services in Europe. Offers insights about what we have learned to date and the areas in which further research is still needed.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

With information recorded for nearly all transactions, the number of data repositories as well as their contents are rapidly growing. Furthermore, large enterprises, which own hundreds of operational systems constructed by independent groups at different times, have a desire to share information between these systems.  This requires integrating a large collection of independently written data base schemas, a task that most IT experts find enormously challenging. The industry thrust toward web services and the internet will increase the scope of this information integration problem from inside a single enterprise (intra-enterprise) to among enterprises (inter-enterprise). This thrust will make information integration that much more daunting.

In this talk we will introduce the information integration problem and illustrate why it remains one of the most challenging problems in the field of computing. We will outline the solution space and provide a brief survey of the important research approaches that are likely to provide a basis for tomorrow’s integration systems. In the second part of this talk, we will introduce our own data integration project called Morpheus consisting of a data transformation construction tool and associated repository. Morpheus is motivated by the goal to reuse (pieces of) previously written transformations to solve data integration problems by finding relevant transformations in the repository and then modifying them for repurposing. We believe Morpheus provides an attractive alternative to systems which rely on automatic schema matching which do not represent a solution to the major information integration challenge that we see.  Morpheus is a collaborative project conducted jointly by researchers from the University of Florida and M.I.T.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Even though information technologies/systems (IT/IS) are expected to play an increasingly important role in the development of businesses and the economy in China, managing IT/IS work faces an uphill battle within Chinese organizations. In this talk, I will report on a current research project that investigates the barriers to adoption of IT/IS in Chinese enterprises. I will also examine the challenges that IT/IS workers and managers must overcome, as well as the business and career opportunities for IT/IS workers in China.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Existing cross-selling literature has focused on developing methodologies to better predict purchase probabilities for the next product that is likely to be purchased. The goal is to find the best customers for a scheduled campaign. In this paper, we formulate cross-selling campaigns as a stochastic dynamic programming problem. We explicitly account for the company’s long-term goal which is to maximize the long-term profit of its existing customers while taking into account the development of customer demand over time and the multi-stage role of cross-selling promotion. The model yields optimal cross-selling strategies that are a multi-step, multi-segment and multi-channel cross-selling campaign process about when to target which consumer with what product using what campaign channel (how). Using cross-selling campaign and transaction data provided by a national bank, we demonstrate the dynamic and state-dependent nature of the optimal cross-selling campaign decisions and derive structural properties of the customized and dynamic cross-selling campaign strategies. We show that the suggested cross-selling strategies are both more effective and efficient and the long-term profit is significantly improved.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

While the geographic perspective is not traditionally a significant component of research done in the disciplines focusing on the preservation, transmission, and interpretation of the human record, geographic information is nevertheless a fundamental attribute of much of the data collected and studied in the Humanities. Geographic references appear in texts, are part of the documentation stored with images of historic sites and events, and are used to differentiate between historic individuals with similar names. Thus there is now a growing awareness that the geographic perspective adds a completely new dimension to Humanities scholarship. However, GIS’s origins are in the natural and physical sciences and the ways in which the world is modelled and analysed in GIS generally reflects the traditions and requirements of those fields. This presentation will demonstrate that GIS, if properly used, is not only applicable to quantitative, scientific historical paradigms, but is also extensible to the more humanities-driven, qualitative areas of enquiry.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

The diversity and number of standards available for eBusiness appears to work against the objective of simpler, interoperable exchanges of business documents. Why is this?

This talk will examine whether standards are what we think they are, what some of the current standards are, and what they should be. It then discusses how we can benefit from re-using the patterns described in eBusiness standards.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

"Web 2.0" is rapidly becoming a buzzword in the Web design and development communities. Despite this attention, a definition of the term and its scope are still evolving. To many observers "Web 2.0" appears to be a loose collection of recently developed concepts and technologies including Weblogs, Wikis, podcasts, Web feeds and other forms of collaborative publishing. Added to this mix are social software, Web APIs, Web standards, online Web services, AJAX, and more. In this talk, Bebo White will describe some of common unifying goals of "Web 2.0" with particular emphasis on those that address social networking and online communities.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Our presenter will share insights from China's best CRM practices and analyze the current gaps between China and the globe based on The CRMBodyCheck - a CRM evaluation method developed by GCCRM Global Associates from North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Greater China. This has been used as the evaluation criteria for the Best CRM Practice Awards since 2002. The method offers 258 metrics, 18 measures in five categories: Customer, Strategy, People, Process and Technology, which echo the belief of "CRM Success Beyond Software".

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

criticized in the software industry when they were granted in 1998-1999 because shopping carts were thought to be obvious.

The speaker was Soverain’s expert witness in the case. In the talk we will discuss the role of the computer science expert in patent suits in informing the court about meaning of terminology and how to evaluate the novelty of inventions. We will also examine the effect of the $40 million judgment on Amazon and electronic commerce generally.

To prepare for the talk, consider the following claim of one of the litigated patents (Levergood U.S. Patent 5,708,780):

1. A method of processing service requests from a client to a server system through a network, said method comprising the steps of:

1. forwarding a service request from the client to the server system, wherein communications between the client and server system are according to hypertext transfer protocol;
2. returning a session identifier from the server system to the client; and
3. appending as part of a path name in a uniform resource locator the session identifier to the request and to subsequent service requests from the client to the server system within a session of requests.

Amazon contended, but was unable to prove that this claim was not novel at the time the method was invented in May 1994. To see how tricky claim interpretation can be, try to craft unambiguous definitions of "session," "session identifier," and "appending."

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office & Internet Professional Association.

In this talk, we will provide an overview on the recently advances in the software industry, namely, service oriented architecture (SOA), and describe how SOA can help each company to benefit from it by customer examples in China, US, and Europe. We will discuss how IBM  positions itself in this new software movement.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office & Internet Professional Association.

The Web has rapidly become the world's largest relational database that affects the way we work, learn, shop, and entertain ourselves. Our view of the information on the Web has been traditionally through Web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. This talk will describe how the future of Web use will require that these types of browsers be replaced by specialized applications capable of turning the vast resources of the Web into organized, useful knowledge.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Recent severe weather has showed that countries can never become complacent about the impact from such disasters as Cyclones. The US National Weather Service clearly predicted that path and impact of Hurricane Katrina, but there was a complete lack of information sharing (at all levels of government) in the response phase, and a haphazard approach in the recovery phase. Better planning and coordination with information and communications technologies could have mitigated many of these issues.

A wide range of new technology areas are now emerging to address the need of natural and human-made disasters, such as terrorism. These range from better surveillance systems, improved situational awareness information, trusted systems, and secure ad-hoc networks. This address will review these areas and provide an insight into the research and development directions.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Mary Meeker is the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and serves as co-leader of the Firm’s global technology research team. Ms. Meeker, along with Brian Pitz, covers Internet and PC software companies. Mary Meeker has been dubbed “Queen of the ‘Net?for her work and focus on the evolution of the Internet. She has an impressive track record of understanding emerging technology trends and companies and was an early and consistent believer in opportunities related to the development of the Internet. She was one of the first Wall Street analysts to cover Microsoft, Dell, Intuit, AOL, Netscape, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, VeriSign, eBay and Google.

She is co-author of the industry defining books, The Internet Report (1995) and The Internet Advertising Report (1996) and co-author of The Internet Retailing Report (1997), The Online Classified Advertising Report: It's About Search / Find / Obtain (SFO) (2002), The China Internet Report (2004) and The Technology IPO Yearbook. All in, hundreds of thousands of copies of these reports are in circulation.

Mary joined Morgan Stanley in 1991. Previously, she was a technology research analyst at Cowen and at Salomon Brothers. She attended DePauw University where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Doctor of Letters and she earned a Master’s of Business Administration from Cornell University.

With the help of modern technology, Mary Meeker will be speaking to students at Shantou University with links to the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business at Shanghai and the Hong Kong University on 7th November 2005. It will be a three site conversation with Mary Meeker on the global trends in internet and China’s online future. Mary Meeker will also talk about what it takes to be a good analyst.

• The University of Hong Kong  [Faculty of Engineering and MSc(ECom&IComp) Programme]
• Shantou University
• Cheung Kong School of Business (Shanghai)

The video conferencing seminar was delivered live from Shantou University to The University of Hong Kong and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business at Shanghai

10 years ago, the only mobile phone in Hong Kong were owned by businessmen, The PC was to be found in a third of Hong Kong homes and the Internet was still something confined to universities. The dominant electronic medium was still television.

A lot has happened since then. Digitalisation and globalisation have triggered convergence. This has lead to dramatic changes in the media we consume ?both the time and the money we spend on them.

This address will make use of applied academic and industrial research results to highlight the key trends in media consumption. It will round off by identifying the implications for those concerned with digital media in the medium to long term. Whether you are a producer, publisher, retailer or user of digital content, there should be something here to get you thinking.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

Conventional client-server architecture has a number of technical deficiencies. In the new context of vast numbers of widely-dispersed, powerful and well-connected devices, an alternative architecture has emerged, which overcomes many of the weaknesses of client-server.

Although it has many potential applications, peer-to-peer architecture has been much-used as a means of reticulating audio and video files, with much of the copying being in breach of the ever-increasing basket of rights that make up copyright.

This presentation focuses primarily on P2P architecture, its features, and its applications. It also identifies its strategic implications, particularly for large corporations whose revenues and profits are dependent on their control over copyright materials.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office, HKU SPACE & Internet Professional Association.

There has been an explosion in the availability of data and computing ability in retail management that has led to a new desire on the part of managers to implement demand based management. Demand based management uses statistical models to predict consumer price response using historical information. These models can be used to construct pricing decision support systems for retail managers. Currently, many firms have begun offering software to perform price optimization.  This talk considers how recent advances in academic research can contribute to the implementation of these systems, and in turn consider the new questions likely to be posed by the developers and users of these new systems.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

Understanding professional workers' information seeking behaviors and users' experiences can provide vital insight into the effective management of information technologies / information systems (IT/IS) work as well as new product design. In this talk, I will provide specific examples of how different research methodologies can be applied by practicing managers and engineers to analyze the complex socio-technical process of IT/IS work or new product design.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

Behind the idea of virtual enterprises and web services lies the very simple and natural idea of document exchange. But when they are implemented without disciplined semantics, the input and output documents of business processes often partition their information in incompatible ways, severely constraining the loosely coupled, "plug and play" interoperability that is the defining vision of effective services.

This address introduces the new discipline of Document Engineering, a set of analysis and design techniques that yield meaningful and reusable models of the information exchanges within and between enterprises. It then applies these techniques to describe the Universal Business Language (UBL) as a library of reusable standardized patterns for designing compatible and interoperable documents.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

As GIS emerges as a widely implemented technology, the need for a professional workforce to support it has increased. Around the world, a number of post-graduate courses, certification programs and competency studies have been created. This session will explore what a GIS professional is and how to become one.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

The complexity and requirements of modern Web sites and Applications require a design process that is structured and systematic with many parallels to engineering. This process is multi-disciplinary and beyond the capabilities of a single individual. Therefore, the first generation Webmaster has been forced to evolve into a project team with specialized skills and talents capable of addressing Web issues from an engineering perspective. This talk will introduce the concepts of Web Engineering, why it is necessary, processes and paradigms used, and how we can become prepared to design future Web Applications.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

This talk is a survey of electronic government in the United States, which has a large and diverse federal structure involving the national government as well as state and local governments. Implementation of eGovernment and extensive use of the Internet is mandated by the eGovernment Act of 2002 and various related laws. We will look at how the statutory requirements are supported by a government-wide design known as the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF).

We will review various service offerings, including the government portal FirstGov.gov, Federal rulemaking, integrated judicial systems, land recording and emergency management. All of these require varying levels of security and authentication, so we will review the authentication methods used to secure government data.

Among individual states, Florida leads in making information available to the public electronically. A huge number of government databases that would be regarded as private in other countries, are freely accessible over the Internet, including land records, licensing data and very detailed criminal records. We conclude with a discussion of the nature of public records and the consequences of their ready availability on the World Wide Web.

This presentation will cover Digital Rights Management (DRM) and its emergence in the mobile sector. With the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) releasing advanced DRM standards, the major players have embraced the new secure and trusted features, with the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as the underlying rights expression language. As DRM services increase, so will the need to integrate with existing content and identity systems.  The DRM community now has an open standard but will need to address interoperability with the commercial DRM players and its application to the less-secure Internet.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

Throughout the industrialized world, media consumption patterns changed quite slowly until the end of the 20th century. Significant change took a generation to make itself felt. However, in the last 5 years, the media consumption patterns of the under 25s have begun to change dramatically. Mobile phones, local storage devices for music, the Internet and broadband coupled with changes in print media are part of this - but we still have no clear picture as to what is going on.

Drawing on research and studies from around the world, the presentation provides a framework for assessing the impact of these changes and also offers suggestions for the future work of the digital entertainment industry.

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

In September 2003, my Expert Address was on 'Open Source and Open Content as Models for e-Business'. I developed that into a refereed paper, and presented it at the 17th International eCommerce Conference in Bled, Slovenia in June 2004.

This year's address is a further development of that paper. It focusses specifically on content rather than software, and contrasts the business models that are associated with the 'old' closed content approach with those evident in the 'new' open content era.

The debate about 'free' and 'open' versus 'proprietary' and 'closed' was first engaged in the context of software. But the digital era has also highlighted the need for an appreciation of competing interests in many other kinds of works. Conventional, proprietary approaches are well-established, and large publishers are intent on defending them against the depradations wrought by the digital era. Despite some early successes, it seems unlikely that the copyright supremacists will hold sway for much longer. On the other hand, it is unlikely (and undesirable) that copyright will simply collapse. Publishers need to adapt their thinking and their business models forward into the twenty-first century.

The open content approach can be easily depicted as a communitarian movement, whose values are antithetical to the closed approach and to for-profit business and even economics. But open models are demonstrably not as naive and anti-business as the proponents of greatly strengthened copyright laws and patent practice would like to believe.

The primary examples of open content copyright licences are in the areas of legislation and court judgements, education and training materials, software documentation, creative and literary works, and research papers. By identifying and examining those licences, it is possible to appreciate the kinds of business models that they can support, and to delineate the decisions that need to be made by the originator of a work when structuring the terms of an open copyright licence. 

• Jointly organized by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office and HKU SPACE

Once a society has embraced the concept of democracy, there remains the problem of how to implement public voting so it is fair, safe from tampering, private and accessible to everyone. After the notorious failure of voting systems in Florida during the U.S. presidential election of 2000, a great deal of attention has been focused on electronic voting, its benefits and risks. Substantial concerns have been raised that electronic systems may be unsafe because of the possibility that a manufacturer might distribute software that will count votes improperly or an outsider might gain control of the tabulation mechanism. 

The prospect of voting on the Internet seems irresistible because of its convenience. Toward that end, the U.S. Department of Defense is now developing a comprehensive Internet voting system, known as Project SERVE, designed to allow the approximately 5 million Americans who are overseas or on military installations to vote online. The system will be tested on a small scale in the presidential election of 2004.

In this talk we will review the principal methods of electronic voting, their advantages and disadvantages, including such phenomena as tampering, vote-buying, hacking and other methods used to influence the outcome of elections.

Even though Hong Kong is still the debate of constitutional reform and universal suffrage, computer and political scientists, senior legal and government officers and researchers, and grass root bodies cannot afford not to be aware of what is happening in the world at large, and the eventual coming of electronic voting. Here is a chance for you to listen to a most dynamic orator and an legal and computer expert, Professor Michael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon University, who is also the Visiting Professor of the Department Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Hong Kong, teaching a module in the renowned and established MSc programme in Electronic Commerce and Internet Computing. 

• Organized by: Department of Computer Science and Information Systems and Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong.

When it comes to measuring the performance of universities there are a number of clear-cut indicators used to measure the performance of universities as regards their academic research and teaching prowess.

In an age where industrialized societies are beginning to regard education as an investment to assure future economic growth, is it enough to use parameters such as publications in reviewed journals, enrolment and completion rates and degree grades? Currently in Hong Kong there is discussion of basing the funding of universities not only on their output of graduates but also on the proportion of those graduating who find employment. What are the pros and cons of servicing the private sector like this?

Denmark has recently introduced an additional indicator of university performance, the proportion of graduates who go on to set up their own companies, spun off to develop leading-edge developments in a variety of fields. The IT University of Copenhagen (ITU) won the first Danish innovation award in September 2003 as nearly one in four of its graduates currently sets up a business within 12 months of graduating with a postgraduate qualification. ITU opened its doors 4 months after enabling legislation was enacted by the Danish Folketing (parliament) to establish 2 new IT universities. Going from zero to 1,500 full-time postgraduate and PhD students in next to no time – and then going on to offer diploma and Master’s courses for lifelong learning is a tough challenge at the best of times especially when one considers that the dot.com bubble burst 18 months after the university started.

This presentation takes a personal and independent look at the course of events that lead to setting up the ITU, how it has fared and what measures are currently being taken to reorient its visions and strategic goals in the light of a recent independent, international review. Given that the ITU has a strategic goal of become a world centre of excellence when it comes to electronic games, there are some interesting parallels to thinking and practice in Hong Kong that the speaker will be exploring and discussing. 

Higher education in Hong Kong is at a crossroads: cuts in public funding make it imperative to consider other activities and revenue models such as taught post-graduate courses or e-learning modules. What does it take to ensure that such activities are perceived to be a success by all those concerned? Does it take two to tango? Is success just an issue for the department and the student or does it require the participation of a third stakeholder, a "ménage a trois"? The speaker would like to exchange his views with Hong Kong educators and students.

The complexity of E-commerce Web sites has evolved rapidly from simple online "store fronts" providing only information and simple communication to highly engineered sites incorporating transactions, integration, participation, community, and personalization. It is critical that the "architects" of competitive E-commerce Web sites consider usability design issues in all stages of the Web site's lifespan. 

The benefits of usability design can be clearly seen:

1. E-commerce Web sites provide a primary interface to customers;
2. Web users expect instant gratification from their interaction with these sites;
3. Users "experience" usability before they are committed or buying;
4. Expectations arise from the best Web site across the industry;
5. Competitors are just a "mouse click" away;
6. There is a distinct value for time-constrained information seekers and customers. 

In this address Prof. White will discuss currently successful design techniques for E-commerce Web sites to improve their efficiency and usability. He will also describe current research in human-computer interactions which suggests how Web site design can be used to influence the opinion of potential customers or customer groups.

• Hosted by the MSc (ECom&IComp) Programme Office
  Co-organizer: SOUL, HKU SPACE

Computer systems should provide the information you want, at the point when you want it (the WYWWYWI Principle, pronounced “wee wee wee”), but they frequently do not. Our research encourages a new philosophy of design based on the WYWWYWI Principle, and the tools for authors to provide this easily.

Comprehensive metainformation embodies the WYWWYWI principle. Metainformation includes the structural relationships, lexical relationships, user-declared link-based relationships, and metadata around an element of interest. Combined, the metainformation goes a long way towards establishing the full semantics for (the meaning of and context around) a system’s elements.

We take a three-pronged approach to providing metainformation on a grand scale. First, we provide a systematic methodology for systems analysts to determine the relationships around elements of interest in their information domains—Relationship Analysis. Relationship Analysis will often result in a comprehensive set of a domain’s structural relationships. Second, we provide a Metainformation Engine, which automatically generates sets of structural and lexical relationships around elements of interest as links, as well as metadata within static and virtual documents. Third, we provide an infrastructure for widespread link-based services within both static and virtual documents. This approach provides the inspiration as well as a sound foundation for a ubiquitous embracing of the WYWWYWI principle in the everyday Web systems that people use, whether for business, education or leisure.