Michael Chau

• Ph.D.
• Professor at The University of Hong Kong

Purpose With the increasing agility of IT enterprises, it is crucial to identify suitable managerial strategies for controlling information system development (ISD) projects in the new agile working environments. These environments are characterized by the collaborative nature of work and the recurring nature of communication. This study aims to ex...

Purpose This paper aims to examine why retail firms seldom achieve full integration of online and offline channels as prescribed in omni-channel literature. It examines the intermediate process of channel integration from an internal, operational perspective. Design/methodology/approach This study is composed of two parts. In the first part, the a...

Purpose This study examines how contributors with different achievement goals participate under the influence of two common motivators/demotivators on crowdsourcing platforms, namely system design features and task nature. Design/methodology/approach A free simulation experiment was conducted among undergraduate students with the use of a crowdsou...

Emotional expressions have been widely used in online news. Existing research on the perception of online news has primarily focused on the effect of contextual cues on readers’ reasoning and deliberation behavior; the role of discrete emotions such as anger and sadness, however, has been overlooked. This paper addresses this research gap by invest...

This study focuses on the effect of prior average ratings of a product on subsequent online ratings, and we further analyze whether culture moderates this effect. The anchoring effect theory and cultural dimensions theory serve as the theoretical foundations for our investigation. To our best knowledge, we are the first to introduce the anchoring e...

Since online reviews have become an increasingly important information source for consumers to evaluate products during online shopping, many platforms started to adopt review mechanisms to maximize the value of such massive reviews. In recent years, the review tag function has been adopted in practices and leading the research of sentiment and opi...

Online auction markets host a large number of transactions every day. The transaction data in auction markets are useful for understanding the buyers and sellers in the market. Previous research has shown that sellers with different levels of reputation, as shown by the ratings and comments left in feedback systems, enjoy different levels of price...

Many people face problems of emotional distress. Early detection of high-risk individuals is the key to prevent suicidal behavior. There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media provide clues of people’s emotional distress. In particular, some people leave messages showing emotional distress or even suicide notes on the Internet. I...

Our paper examines whether investor opinions expressed in social media predicted stock returns of financial firms during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis. We conduct a textual analysis of the articles published on the stock market insight website Seeking Alpha before the crisis and find that banks that were described in articles with a higher...

Reward-based crowdfunding are increasingly playing an important role in raising financial capital for small projects. The most important goal for creators on the platform is to successfully raise enough capital for their projects. Our study aims to provide a new angle to understand backer’s decision-making process on pledging behavior by uncovering...

This paper proposes that challenge, an orthogonal game attribute, can be used to improve game effectiveness. The results of our study suggest that attitude toward challenge should be considered when we tune challenge in the serious game for better learning results. A significant moderating role of attitude toward challenge is found in the relations...

Live streaming, as a new practice of online digital content business, generates revenue mainly through users’ monetary gift giving to content providers. The designs of the live-streaming platforms allow users to experience real-time interactions with both content providers and the virtual community. This study investigates potential motivations reg...

Many studies have demonstrated the benefits of gamification in the context of crowdsourcing. However, not every user benefits equally from gamification. Most of the current studies focused on the game elements of gamified systems. Scant attention has been paid to the factors related to the users (Koivisto and Hamari 2014; Morschheuser et al. 2016)....

Color trends are fickle components of clothing styles. It’s a tough task to predict trendy colors for the fashion industry. Meanwhile, excess inventory of certain colors and stock out of popular colors both lead to extra costs. Intense competition and short product life cycles require fashion apparel retailers to be flexible and responsive to the c...

Expert-written product reviews are prevalent and could be in many forms, ranging from short textual descriptions to video-embedded blogs. For consumers, expert reviews can not only optimize their purchase decisions, but also play an important role in facilitating consumer learning. In this paper, we first draw on profession research and propose two...

Increasingly more investors are seeking information from social media to help make investment decisions. Considering that information on penny stocks is often less reported in traditional media, investors may rely more on social media to obtain such information for investment advice. Although previous research has shown that stock opinions in tradi...

Since online reviews have become an increasingly important information source for consumers to evaluate products during online shopping, many platforms started to adopt review mechanisms to maximize the value of such massive reviews. In recent years, the review tag function has been adopted in practices and leading the research of sentiment and opi...

The limited information provided by peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms often is not sufficient for lenders to determine if a borrower is trustworthy and able to repay the loan. Using a unique dataset from a P2P lending platform, which allows lenders to seek information directly from borrowers and borrowers to respond to the questions and comments...

Aim The aim of this study was to explore the online distress and help-seeking behavior of youths in Hong Kong. Methods A cross-sectional telephone-based survey was conducted among 1,010 young people in Hong Kong. Logistic regression analysis was then performed to identify the factors associated with those who reported expressing emotional distress...

As information on the Internet grows exponentially, online users primarily rely on search engines (SEs) to locate e-commerce sites for online shopping. To generate revenue while providing free service to users, SE companies offer sponsored link (SL) placements to e-commerce sites that want to appear in the first SE results page. However, the lack o...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2017, held in Jeju Island, South Korea, in May 2017 in conjunction with PAKDD 2017, the 21st Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The 8 revised full papers and one short paper were carefully re...

Social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook have a potential to become a valuable learning environment. Facebook games with appropriate instructional design may provide players with better learning experiences and outcomes. Using an effective educational Facebook game, we aimed to explore the educational effects of Facebook games as self-direct...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2016, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2016 in conjunction with PAKDD 2016, the 20th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers...

This paper examines messages posted in a hacker forum and constructs four user profiles based on the observed behavior patterns. It starts with the development of an automated forum post classification system to understand the knowledge transfer pattern exhibited by each user over time. Two patterns, knowledge acquisition and knowledge provision, a...

Background Severe social withdrawal behaviors among young people have been a subject of public and clinical concerns. Aims This study aimed to explore the prevalence of social withdrawal behaviors among young people aged 12–29 years in Hong Kong. Methods A cross-sectional telephone-based survey was conducted with 1,010 young individuals. Social w...

Plagiarism has been a common phenomenon in the online environment. But the plagiarism phenomenon in online product reviews has been an uninvestigated issue, in spite of various studies in the product review domain. Readers of the plagiarized review could obtain the needed information for understanding the quality or other features of the products t...

P2P lending directly connects borrowers and lenders without a financial institution as the intermediary. This new form of crowdfunding brings lenders more investment opportunities, but also poses unprecedented risks of default and fraud. This research-in-progress paper focuses on a specific type of fraud, loan request fraud, which may be unique to...

Study Objective: The aim of this exploratory study was to examine compensated dating (CD) among youth from the public health perspective. The mental and sexual health and help-seeking behaviors of youth ever engaged in CD was examined to inform feasible engagement and helping strategies for this recent phenomenon. Design and Participants: A cross-s...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2015, held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in May 2015 in conjunction with PAKDD 2015, the 19th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and sele...

This study examines the development of social capital in the collaboration network of information systems (IS) scholars over a 33-year period (from 1980 to 2012). Using the co-authorship data from six premier journals (MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, European Journal of Information Systems, and Infor...

This study examines the role of online networking in a grassroots movement in China. Drawing on Manuel Castells’s theory of communication power in the network society, we argue that microblogs can facilitate China’s mass self-communication in a network environment, even under authoritarian control, and are able to challenge the power of agenda sett...

Background: Text analysis of personal documents provides insight into the cognition of those who complete suicide. Many personal documents are digitalized and easily found on the Internet, which can be used to advance suicide research. Aims: (1) To examine the temporal relationships between posting intensity and language use to sketch the suicidal...

Short message service SMS is an important component of modern mobile services. Given unique characteristics of Chinese language, it is imperative to conduct study to understand characteristic of language usage patterns in Chinese SMS so that important facts like why and how people in China use SMS can be discovered. In this paper, we report an anal...

Three-dimensional virtual environments have gained wide popularity due to improvement in graphic rendering technology and networking infrastructure. Many education institutions have been trying to leverage the potential of 3D virtual environments in their application in education. In this research, we aim to evaluate the students' perception of vir...

Internet users may see and comment on suicide expressions in the cyberspace that are not identified by helping professionals. The communication between the two parties is not well facilitated. In light of this situation, we present a system using collective intelligence from Internet users to efficiently and effectively identify suicidal people in...

One of the generally recognized marketing principles is that retaining customers is more profitable than winning prospective customers. Therefore, how to retain existing customers and improve their repeat purchases is an important consideration for practitioners to gain profit. The purpose of this study is to investigate factors influencing custome...

Internet-based learning programs provide people with massive health care information and self-help guidelines on improving their health. The advent of Web 2.0 and social networks renders significant flexibility to embedding highly interactive components, such as games, to foster learning processes. The effectiveness of game-based learning on social...

The authors investigated censorship practices and the use of microblogs — or weibos, in Chinese — using 111 million microblogs collected between 1 January and 30 June 2012. To better control for alternative explanations for censorship decisions attributable to an individual's characteristics and choices, they used a matched case-control study desig...

Chinese microblogs have drawn global attention to this online application's potential impact on the country's social and political environment. However, representative and reliable statistics on Chinese microbloggers are limited. Using a random sampling approach, this study collected Chinese microblog data from the service provider, analyzing the p...

The increasing popularity of Web 2.0 has led to exponential growth of user-generated content in both volume and significance. One important type of user-generated content is the blog. Blogs encompass useful information (e.g., insightful product reviews and information-rich consumer communities) that could potentially be a "gold mine" for business i...

Web site navigability refers to the degree to which a visitor can follow a Web site's hyperlink structure to successfully find information with efficiency and ease. In this study, we take a data-driven approach to measure Web site navigability using Web data readily available in organizations. Guided by information foraging and information-processi...

Nowadays, people are familiar with online communication and tend to express their deeper feelings on the Web. In the light of this situation, we present a hybrid system based on affect analysis for mining emotional distress tendencies from publicly available blogs to identify needy people in order to provide timely intervention and promote better p...

Blogs have become increasingly popular and have been widely used for such purposes as online diaries, commentaries, and socialization. In this paper we present our research on extraction of useful customer group information from blogs. We use both content analysis and structural analysis methods to identify important bloggers who either blog a lot...

Comparison shopping sites facilitate consumers' pre-purchase evaluation of alternatives, and draw increasing traffic to merchants' Web sites. As the main source of revenue, sponsored link advertising has become one of the most important aspects for comparison shopping services. However, little is known about the effectiveness of sponsored links and...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2013, held in Beijing, China, in August 2013 in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2013). The 4 revised full papers presented together with 7 short papers were carefully revie...

In this paper we propose a research agenda for studying the impact of query suggestion features on cognitive load and customer satisfaction during online shopping in e-commerce websites. Despite the popular use of query suggestion features in search engines and large e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com and eBay, there is little research in this...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2012, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in May 2012 - held in conjunction with the Pacific Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2012). The 8 revised full papers and the 8 revised short papers presented t...

To effectively score pages with uncertainty in web social networks, we first proposed a new concept called transition probability matrix and formally defined the uncertainty in web social networks. Second, we proposed a hybrid page scoring algorithm, called WebScore, based on the PageRank algorithm and three centrality measures including degree, be...

Several topics that were covered during the IEEE Symposium on Advanced Management of Information for Globalized Enterprises (AMIGE) held in September 2008, in Tianjin, China, are presented. The symposium focused on the globalized information management, a multidisciplinary covering such fields as computer science, industrial engineering, informatio...

We study the problem of clustering data objects with location uncertainty. In our model, a data object is represented by an uncertainty region over which a probability density function (pdf) is defined. One method to cluster such uncertain objects is to apply the UK-means algorithm [1], an extension of the traditional K-means algorithm, which assig...

In the information society, it is important for firms to manage their core information resources securely. However, the difficulty of measuring the return on an IT security investment is one of the critical obstacles for firms in making such investment ...

While the Web provides a lot of useful information to managers and decision makers in organizations for decision support, it requires a lot of time and cognitive effort for users to sift through a search result list returned by search engines to find useful information. Previous research in information visualization has shown that visualization tec...

As the amount of online Chinese contents grows, there is a critical need for effective Chinese word segmentation approaches to facilitate Web computing applications in a range of domains including terrorism informatics. Most existing Chinese word segmentation approaches are either statistics-based or dictionary-based. The pure statistical method ha...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2011, held in Beijing, China, in July 2011. The 8 revised full papers and the 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on terrorism i...

Objective: Prediction of moving objects with uncertain motion patterns is emerging rapidly as a new exciting paradigm and is important for law enforcement applications such as criminal tracking analysis. However, existing algorithms for prediction in spatio-temporal databases focus on discovering frequent trajectory patterns from historical data. M...

R ECENT years have witnessed the emergence of novel database applications in various nontraditional do-mains, including location-based services, sensor networks, RFID systems, and biological and biometric databases. Traditionally, data mining has been widely used to reveal interesting patterns in the vast amounts of data generated by such applicati...

Recently, spatial analysis in crime databases has attracted increased attention. In order to cope with the problem of discovering the closest pairs of objects within a constrained spatial region, as required in crime investigation applications, we propose a query processing algorithm called Growing Window based Constrained k-Closest Pairs (GWCCP)....

Search engine development tools have been made to allow users to build their own search engines. However, most of these tools have been designed for advanced computer users. Users without a full understanding of topics such as Web spidering would find these tools difficult to use due to different issues in terms of user interface, performance, and...

Web 2.0 and social network applications have become increasingly popular. It is important for these applications to help users in maintaining their social networks by providing functions on friend suggestion and friend browsing. However, little study in this area has been reported in the literature. This paper proposes the design of two modules for...

With increasing emphasis on using data analysis in decision support in healthcare organizations, we describe an example in collecting and analyzing data for a health organization. In particular, we describe the process in identifying the best location for Hong Kong Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service to establish a new blood donation center based o...

Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) is defined as the study of the development and use of advanced information systems and technologies for national, international, and societal security-related applications. With the rise of global terrorism, the field has been given an increasing amount of attention from academic researchers, law enforcem...

With the advent of the World Wide Web, many business applications that utilize data mining and text mining techniques to extract useful business information on the Web have evolved from Web searching to Web mining. It is important for students to acquire knowledge and hands-on experience in Web mining during their education in information systems c...

It is important for education in computer science and information systems to keep up to date with the latest development in technology. With the rapid development of the Internet and the Web, many schools have included Internet-related technologies, such as Web search engines and e-commerce, as part of their curricula. Previous research has shown t...

The use of non-English Web search engines has been prevalent. Given the popularity of Chinese Web searching and the unique characteristics of Chinese language, it is imperative to conduct studies with focuses on the analysis of Chinese Web search queries. In this paper, we report our research on the character usage of Chinese search logs from a Web...

Blogs have become increasingly popular, and new blogs are generated every day. Many of the contents are useful for applications in various domains, such as business, politics, research, social work, and linguistics. However, automatically collecting and analyzing blogs isn't straightforward due to the large size and dynamic nature of the blogospher...

This paper proposes a research agenda for studying factors that may affect marketing effectiveness in the context of online communities. Findings of prior studies are synthesized into a more comprehensive review of the state of the art of research on word of mouth marketing through online social networks. Based on the review, we propose a research...

Understanding customers is crucial to companies’ decision-making. With the advent of Web 2.0, more and more people choose to express their feelings and articulate their attitudes th rough online social communities such as blogs and web forums. These new sources of information offer the potential to obtain large quantities of customer feedback using...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Pacific Asia Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics, PAISI 2009, held in Bangkok, Thailand, in April 2009. The 10 revised full papers, 7 revised short papers together with 1 keynote lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in top...

Analysts often search the Web for business intelligence using traditional search engines which provide keyword-based search. Recently, it has been suggested that the incoming links, or backlinks, of a company's Web site can provide useful information about the company's "Web communities". Backlinks refer to other Web pages which have a hyperlink po...

In order to analyze security and terrorism related content in Chinese, it is important to perform word segmentation on Chinese documents. There are many previous studies on Chinese word segmentation. The two major approaches are statistic-based and dictionary-based approaches. The pure statistic methods have lower precision, while the pure dictiona...

In order to analyze security and terrorism related content in Chinese, it is important to perform word segmentation on Chinese documents. There are many previous studies on Chinese word segmentation. The two major approaches are statistic-based and dictionary-based approaches. The pure statistic methods have lower precision, while the pure dictiona...

While small-scale search engines in specific domains and languages are increasingly used by Web users, most existing search engine development tools do not support the development of search engines in languages other than English, cannot be integrated with other applications, or rely on proprietary software. A tool that supports search engine creat...

Yiu-ming Cheung from Hong Kong Baptist University, China, and Michael Chau from The University of Hong Kong, China, has discussed significant facts of the IEEE (Hong Kong) Computational Intelligence Chapter report. The Hong Kong Chapter, founded in 2003, is aimed at coordinating and supporting work and stimulating the public's interests in the fiel...

The World Wide Web has become a vital supplier of information that allows organizations to carry on such tasks as business intelligence, security monitoring, and risk assessments. Having a quick and reliable supply of correct facts from perspective is often mission critical. By following design science guidelines, we have explored ways to recombine...

As the Web continues to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to search for relevant information using traditional search engines. Topic-specific search engines provide an alternative way to support efficient information retrieval on the Web by providing more precise and customized searching in various domains. However, developers of topic-spe...

The problem of information and knowledge management in the knowledge intensive and time critical environment of law enforcement has posed an interesting problem for information technology professionals in the field. Coupled with this challenging environment are issues relating to the integration of multiple systems, each having different functional...

Blogs have become increasingly popular in recent years. Bloggers can express their opinions and emotions more freely and easily than before.Many communities have emerged in the blogosphere, including racist and hate groups that are trying to share their ideology, express their views, or recruit new group members. It is imperative to analyze these c...