We are delighted to announce that our project, “GIVE: Generic and Intelligent Volunteering for Supportive Communities,” has been chosen by the Faculty of Engineering for the Faculty Knowledge Exchange (KE) Award 2024. This marks the second time our project has earned this esteemed recognition, and we are incredibly proud of this accomplishment.

Our dedicated team has worked relentlessly to create and refine HINCare, an innovative platform that connects volunteers with communities in need. We have made a significant impact in the lives of countless individuals, and it is truly an honor to have our efforts acknowledged in this manner. In addition to the accolade, we are also thrilled to receive a monetary award of $100,000 to support further KE work. This funding will help us enhance and expand Timebanking Platform, ultimately enabling us to reach and support even more communities.

We are deeply grateful for this recognition, and we want to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has contributed to the project. As we continue our work, we remain committed to making a lasting, positive impact on society. Thank you once again for your support, and congratulations to all those involved in this remarkable achievement.

More details can be viewed: https://www.ke.hku.hk/spotlight/faculty-knowledge-exchange-awards-2024

Prof. Reynold Cheng was humbled to be recognized as an Outstanding Research Student Supervisor and Best Teacher in the same year (2023-24). Prof. Cheng was very proud of his talented students and learned so much from them. He would like to thank the HKU Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science Department for the full support.

Little Bluebridge Foundation recently donated HK$15 million to HINCare to further develop and enhance volunteering services. HINCare is a project developed by Professor Reynold C.K. Cheng from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). It is a state-of-the-art platform which uses AI technologies to support volunteering among multiple NGOs and charity organisations. It employs timebanking, which allows a volunteer to use a user-friendly app to earn “time credits” based on the time he/she spent on a volunteering task; the time credits can be viewed and used in the app to acquire other services or goods. Another salient feature of HINCare is that it is based on a cloud-based subscription model, in which an organisation can set up its timebanking service mode easily in the cloud platform, without going through the hassles of developing a new app.

Moreover, HINCare has a built-in heterogeneous information network (HIN), describing the relationship between helpers and service recipients. Based on the HIN, Professor Cheng’s research team develops novel recommender system algorithms, in order to find the most appreciated helpers for service recipients. Besides investigating HIN analytics problems, the team examines scalable algorithms for finding interesting patterns from billion-node graphs and studies large probabilistic and crowdsourcing databases. The research has been published in top databases and AI conferences. Professor Cheng has also been awarded ACM Distinguished membership, HKU Outstanding Research Supervisor Award in 2022, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar in 2023 & 2024 and World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University in 2022.

18 NGOs are using the HINCare system currently. They reflected that HINCare alleviates them from huge amounts of paperwork and resources so that they can focus on helping people in need. The system has served more than 10,000 users, accumulating 10 million minutes of time credits, and cultivating a social capital of HK$7 million. The HINCare project has received five awards in the past four years, including two Hong Kong ICT Awards in 2021 & 2023, two Asia Smart Apps awards in 2020 & 2021, and HKU Knowledge Exchange Award (Engineering) in 2021.

HINCare is a cloud-based platform that uses AI to support volunteering among multiple organisations. Thanks to the generous donation of the Little Bluebridge Foundation, we will continue to improve HINCare and serve more NGOs and companies in the next five years,” said Professor Cheng. The team plans to strengthen HINCare to promote volunteering activities to citizens and engage other companies in timebanking, in order to create a mutual-help culture in the community.

Details about HINCare: https://hincare.hku.hk

More details can be viewed at HKU press release: https://www.hku.hk/press/press-releases/detail/27453.html

HKU STAR Lab is delighted to announce Professors Reynold Chang have been recognised as the 2024 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar (Honorable Mention) by AMiner.

The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Annual List: https://aminer.cn/ai2000

More details can be viewed at HKU press release: https://www.hku.hk/press/press-releases/detail/27294.html

Congratulations to Professor Reynold CHENG and his team for receiving a donation of HKD$15 million from the Little Bluebridge Foundation for further development of HINCare.

“HINCare” (Heterogeneous Information Network for Elderly-Care Helper Recommendation) helps to manage the workload and logistics of volunteering and time-banking management for NGOs and charity organisations. What’s more, it can store useful statistics and help NGOs formulate long-term strategy and identify needs of elderly people through data analytics. By matching service requests with volunteers in the community intelligently, the system stretches elderly people’s potential in serving the community and helps them develop mutual help and support networks. It also facilitates the development and expansion of Time Bank community projects.

With the generous donation, Professor Reynold CHENG’s team will continue to enhance HINCare in the next five years. Collaboration or data sharing between different organizations will be explored to expand volunteer services. Besides NGOs, other companies can also participate in volunteering through HINCare, creating more impact and cultivating mutual-help culture in our community.