Professor Chin, Francis Y.L.

BASc Toronto; MSc, MA, PhD Princeton; FIEEE, FHKIE, FHKACE Hon
Emeritus Professor

Tel: (+852) 2859 2178
Fax: (+852) 2559 8447
Email: chin@cs.hku.hk
Homepage: https://www.cs.hku.hk/~chin

Professor Chin has retired from HKU in 2015 and is now an Emeritus Professor of The University of Hong Kong. He is now working as Founder and Chief Solution Officer of a startup company,   DeepTranslate Limited , on Machine Translation of financial documents at Hong Kong Science Park.

Professor Chin received his B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, and his M.S., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively. Prior to joining The University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 1985, he had taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Alberta; the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and the University of Texas at Dallas.

Professor Chin was the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at HKU and was the founding Head of the Department from its establishment until December 31, 1999. From 2002 until July 31, 2006, he had served as the Associate Dean of the Graduate School. Since 2007, Prof Chin has been serving as an Associate Dean of the Faculty of Engineering.

Professor Chin has served as conference chairman and a member of the program committee of numerous international workshops and conferences. He is currently serving as Managing Editor of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science and is a member of the editorial boards of Current Bioinformatics, Information Processing Letters, the Computer Processing of Oriental Languages and the Chinese Journal of Advanced Software Research.

Professor Chin has served on many government policy and advisory committees and in 1998 acted as the Project Leader of a study commissioned by the Select Committee appointed by the Legislative Council to inquire into the circumstances leading to the problems surrounding the commencement of the operation of the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok (CLK). During 2001, he was seconded to serve as the (interim) CEO of the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company Limited.

Professor Chin's research interests include design and analysis of algorithms, machine learning, and bioinformatics including Motif-finding (Motif discovery) and De Novo genome assembly (IDBA) . In 2002 at the age of 54, he discovered the challenge of marathon running and has finished one marathon and five half-marathons.

Research Interests

Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Machine Learning and Bioinformatics

Selected Publications

• Yu Peng, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu, Xin-Guang Zhu, Ming-Zhu Lv and Francis Y.L. Chin, IDBA-Tran: A More Robust de novo de Bruijn Graph Assembler for Transcriptomes with Uneven Expression Levels, The 21th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and 12th European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB 2013), Berlin (July 2013)
• Yi Wang, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu and Francis Y.L. Chin, MetaCluster 5.0: A two-round Binning Approach for Metagenomic Data for Low-abundance Species in a Noisy Sample, The 11th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2012), Bali, Switzerland, also in Bioinformatics
• Yu Peng, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu and Francis Y.L. Chin, T-IDBA: A de novo Iterative de Bruijn Graph Assembler for Transcriptome, Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2011), Vancouver (March 2011)
• Yu Peng, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu and Francis Y.L. Chin, Meta-IDBA: A de Novo Assembler for Metagenomic Data, The 19th Annual International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and 10th European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB 2011), Vienna, July 2011, also in Bioinformatics
• Yu Peng, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu and Francis Y.L. Chin, T-IDBA: A de novo Iterative de Bruijn Graph Assembler for Transcriptome, Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2011), Vancouver (March 2011)
• Joseph Wun-Tat Chan, Francis Y. L. Chin, Deshi Ye and Yong Zhang, Absolute and Asymptotic Bounds for Online Frequency Allocation in Cellular Networks, Algorithmica, 58(2): 498-515 (October 2010) - preliminary version appeared in SPAA 2007
• Yu Peng, Henry C.M. Leung, S.M. Yiu and Francis Y.L. Chin, IDBA - A Practical Iterative de Bruijn Graph De Novo Assembler, Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2010), Lisbon, Portugal (August 2010)
• Francis Y.L. Chin, Zeyu Guo and He Sun, Minimum Manhattan Network is NP-Complete, Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2009), Aarhus, Denmark 393-402 (June 2009)
• Mee Yee Chan, Wun-Tat Chan, Francis Y.L. Chin, Stanley P.Y. Fung, and Ming-Yang Kao, Linear-time Haplotype Inference on Pedigrees without Recombinations and Mating Loops, SIAM Journal of Computing, 38(6): 2179-2197 (March 2009) - preliminary version appeared in WABI 2006

Recent Research Grants

• "Online Strategy for Maximizing Seller's Revenue" (HKU 7114/13E), HK$500,000 (2013-2016)
• "Next-Generation Sequencing Algorithms" (HKU 7111/12E) HK$905,425 (2012-2015)
• "Combinatorial Phenotype Testing" (HKU 7117/09E) HK$394,053 (2009-2011)
• "Finding Conserved Patterns in Biological Networks" (HKU 7116/08E) HK$777,108 (2008-2011)
• "Design and Analysis of Online Algorithms for Frequency/Code Assignment Problems in Cellular Networks" (HKU 7113/07E) HK$418,000 (2007-2009)
• "A New Motif Representation Based on Position Specific Patterns" (HKU 7120/06E) HK$ 775,008 (2006-2009)
• "Computationally Haplotyping Pedigree Data" (HKU 7119/05E) HK$ 359,224 (2005-2007)
• "Robust Object Segmentation Method for Video Surveillance System", ITF fund (UIT/058), $365,000 (2004-2006)
• "High Performance and Intelligent Video Surveillance System", ITF fund (UIM/118), HK$5,444,000 (2003-2005)
• "Finding Motifs for Sequences with Weak Binding Sites", RGC grant HKU 7135/04E, HK$339,414 (2004-2006)
• "On-line Scheduling with Partial Job Values", RGC grant HKU 7142/03E, HK$377,149 (2003-2005)
• "Tetrahedralization of Convex Polyhedron", RGC grant HKU 7019/00E, HK$635,817 (2000-2003)
• "Line Estimator/Stabbing Problem", RGC grant HKU 7024/98E, HK$380,000 (1998-2001)
• "A User-friendly Flexi-IT Approach for Education", HONG KONG QUALITY EDUCATION FUND, HK$10,256,200 (1998-00)
• "Multiresolution Polygonal/Subdivision Approximation", RGC grant HKU 541/96E, HK$416,000 (1997-1999)