Professor Francis Y.L. Chin is Professor of Computer Science and Taikoo Professor of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong. Professor Chin has served as head of the Computer Science Department from its start until 1999 and is currently the Chair of the Department. He has also performed a number of important tasks for the Government of Hong Kong including undertaking a study into problems at Hong Kong International Airport.

Academic Career

Chin graduated from the University of Toronto in 1972 and received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1976. Before his appointment in Hong Kong, he held a variety of teaching positions in a number of universities in the US and Canada.

Professor Chin was recruited to head the Computer Science Department at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Managing Editor of the International Journal of the Foundations of Computer Science and is also a member of the editorial boards of a number of other journals.

Government Service

Professor Chin was the project leader for a study commissioned by a Select Committee of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong into the cause of delays to the start of operation of the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chep La Kok. In 2001, he was seconded to act as the interim CEO of the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company.

He has also served on a range of Hong Kong government committees including:

• the Innovation and Technology Fund Vetting Committee;
• a variety of committees on research grants and university funding committees ;
• the Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee of the information Technology and Broadcasting Committtee; and
• the Promotion and Monitoring Sub-committe of the Quality Education fund.

Research Interests

Professor Chin's interests include Bioinformatic, Computer Vision, the Design and Analysis of Algorithms

• Motif-finding software packages
• Security

Publications

• F.Y.L. Chin, N.L. Ho, T.W. Lam, P.W.H. Wong, Efficient Constrained Multiple Sequence Alignment with Performance Guarantee, Journal of Theoretical Computer Science (to appear)
• F.Y.L. Chin, H.C.M. Leung, S.M.Yiu, T.W. Lam, R. Rosenfeld, W.W. Tsang, D.K. Smith, Y. Jiang, Finding Motifs for Insufficient Number of Sequences with Strong Binding to Transcription Factor, Proceedings of the 8th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2004), Westin Hotel Horton Plaza, San Diego, CA USA, March 2004
• W.T. Chan, F.Y.L. Chin, and H.F. Ting, Escaping a Grid by Edge-Disjoint Paths, Algorithmica 36:343-359, April 2003. Also appeared in the Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'00), San Francisco, USA, January 2000
• F.Y.L. Chin and S.P.Y. Fung, Online Scheduling with Partial Job Values: Does Timesharing or Randomization Help?, Algorithmica, 37:149-164, August 2003
• F.Y.L. Chin and S.P.Y. Fung, Improved competitiveness algorithms for online scheduling with partial job values, The Ninth International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2003), Big Sky, MT, USA, pp. 425-434, July 2003

External links

• Honk Kong University people