With the ubiquitous and accessible Internet, we face real and challenging matters related to technology ethics daily. For instance, issues on digital copyrights, intellectual property, software piracy, and personal privacy are all part of reality that we must deal with when we perform search, download files, play computer games, and communicate via social networking sites. In this talk, I will first present the background on technology ethics with examples in various disciplines. I will then focus on one aspect of technology ethics specifically related to plagiarism in education institutions and detail its seriousness and grave consequences in the academia. Moreover, I will introduce the VeriGuide system, a similarity text identification system that we have developed to assist education institutions to fight against plagiarism in order to uphold academic integrity and honesty. As a case study, we show how the VeriGuide system is being deployed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and elaborate on some of the policy and administrative issues that may be helpful for other sister institutions to implement such a strategy in order to improve academic quality and fairness.

Dr. King's research interests include machine learning, web intelligence & social computing, and multimedia processing. In these research areas, he has over 200 technical publications in journals (JMLR, ACM TOIS, IEEE TNN, Neurocomputing, NN, IEEE BME, PR, IEEE SMC, JAMC, JASIST, IJPRAI, DSS, etc.) and conferences (NIPS, IJCAI, CIKM, SIGIR, KDD, PAKDD, ICDM, WWW, WI/IAT, WCCI, IJCNN, ICONIP, ICDAR, etc.). In addition, he has contributed over 20 book chapters and edited volumes. Moreover, Dr. King has over 30 research and applied grants. One notable system he has developed is the VeriGuide System, previously known as the CUPIDE (Chinese University Plagiarism IDentification Engine) system, which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of text-based documents in both English and in Chinese to promote academic integrity and honesty.

Dr. King is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (TNN) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Open Information Systems Journal, Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Applied Mathematics, and Neural Information Processing–Letters and Reviews Journal (NIP-LR). He has also served as Special Issue Guest Editor for Neurocomputing, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics (IJICC), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), and International Journal of Computational Intelligent Research (IJCIR). He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM, International Neural Network Society (INNS), and Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). Currently, he is serving the Neural Network Technical Committee (NNTC) and the Data Mining Technical Committee under the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (formerly the IEEE Neural Network Society). He is also a member of the Board of Governors of INNS and a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of APNNA.

Dr. King joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993. He received his B.Sc. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.