Computer Science Student CHAN Yun-Kwan Emprise Won the 2011 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award

Computer Science MPhil student CHAN Yun-Kwan Emprise has been awarded the 2011 Mr Armin and Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award with his undergraduate paper "A Convex Formulation of Modularity Maximization for Community Detection" supervised by Prof. Dit-Yan YEUNG. The award presentation ceremony was held on 5 May 2011 at HKUST.

Entitled "A Convex Formulation of Modularity Maximization for Community Detection", the paper proposes a reformulation of an optimization problem for the 2-partition problem based on the modularity measure proposed previously for community detection. It can be extended naturally for tackling the general k-partition problem directly without tackling multiple 2-partition subproblems like other methods do. A convex relaxation scheme is used to give an iterative algorithm. Compared with some related methods, this method is both scalable and competitive in performance via maintaining a good trade-off between efficiency and quality.

Prof. Dit-Yan YEUNG

Prof. Dit-Yan YEUNG is a full professor in Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Southern California. After that he started his academic career at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and then joined the HKUST.

CHAN Yun-Kwan Emprise

Emprise is now doing his MPhil under the supervision of Prof. Yeung. His research interest is machine learning.

President Chan, Emprise, Emprise's parents, and Prof. Yeung (from left to right) at the Award Presentation Ceremony