The Web has transformed the landscape on how humans interact socially. With the advent of Web 2.0, Social Computing has emerged as a new and innovative paradigm that changes the way we communicate, interact, and learn. Social Computing involves the investigation of collective intelligence by using computational techniques such as machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, etc. on social behavioral data collected from blogs, wikis, emails, instant messages, clickthrough data, query logs, social bookmarks, tags, etc. In this talk, I will first introduce Social Computing by outlining some of the unique characteristics and aspects that are found on the various social platforms. I will then illustrate one social computing application of query suggestion using clickthrough data based on the heat diffusion equation over a graph. Lastly, I will conclude with some current challenges and potential future promises of Social Computing.

Dr. King's research interests include machine learning, web intelligence, social computing, data mining, and multimedia information 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 patented 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.