Staff Profile

Biography

Prof. Kwok (Ricky) joined the University (then Open University of Hong Kong) in February 2021 as Vice President (Students and Support).  From January 2023 through August 2024, Ricky's role was Vice President (Research and Student Development).  Before joining the University, he was the Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) for a five-year term from January 2015 to December 2019, spearheading various mission-critical institutional e-learning endeavours (e.g., MOOCs, flipped-classroom learning, innovative pedagogies and platforms, learning analytic research, etc.) via a university-central office called Technology-Enriched Learning Initiative (TELI) which he founded in 2015.  He also served as an Associate Dean of Engineering and the Deputy Head of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at HKU.  Prior to that, he was a full-time staff member at Colorado State University (Fort Collins, Colorado, USA), University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California, USA), and Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA).

Ricky’s research focus has been on designing efficient communication protocols and robust resources management algorithms toward enabling large scale distributed mobile computing. In these research areas, he has authored one textbook, co-authored another two textbooks, and published more than 200 technical papers in various leading journals, research books, and refereed international conference proceedings. In a dataset from Stanford University updated annually since 2019, he is listed as one of the worldwide top 2% most influential researchers based on his contributions in the field of Networking and Telecommunications. Over his 23 years with HKU, Ricky's R&D work has received funding support in excess of HK$100 million (as Project Coordinator, PI, or Co-PI). 

Ricky is a Fellow of the IEEE (for “Contributions to Resource Scheduling Algorithms in Parallel and Distributed Systems”), the IET, and the HKIE. He is also a Senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Moreover, he has been a long-serving member of the IEEE Computer Society and the IEEE Communications Society. From March 2006 to December 2011, Ricky served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing as a Subject Area Editor in Peer-to-Peer Computing. He also served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems for four years from January 2013 to December 2016.

Ricky received the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from HKU in November 2004. In January 2010, one of his journal papers was ranked #4 among top ten All-Time Most Cited Papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, based on Scopus and Google Scholar citation counts as of October 2009 (see the Editor’s Note for details). In April 2013, he got the Outstanding Reviewer Service Award from the IEEE Computer Society (under the Reviewer Appreciation Program) because as of 2013 he was the All-Time Most Prolific Reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (see this official announcement).

Teaching Areas & Research Interests

• Parallel and Distributed Systems
• Wireless Networking

Academic & Professional Experience

1. Invited Keynote Speaker, “Learning Begins at the End of Your Comfort Zone,” Teaching and Learning Week, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, October 28, 2019.
2. Invited Speaker, “Future Courses: Shape and Size,” Universitas 21: The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Future of the University, University ofJohannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa, October 9-11, 2019.
3. Invited Speaker, “Rethinking Internationalization,” 10th Annual Symposium on China Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, April 13, 2019.
4. Invited Speaker, “Responsive University,” Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, November 17, 2018.
5. Invited Keynote Speaker, “Technology Enriched Learning,” International Symposium and The 93rd Open Conference: Envisioning Blended Next-Generation Higher Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, March 3, 2018.
6. Invited Keynote Speaker, “Heterogeneous Computing Systems for Massive Personalized Online Education,” 26th International Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (HCW 2017), in conjunction with the 31st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2017), Orlando, Florida, USA, May 29-June 2, 2017.
7. Invited Speaker, “HKU E-Learning: Where Are We?,” Open Smart Education (OSE) Center Seminar Series, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea, September 22, 2016.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

• J. Wang, Y.-K. Kwok, and E. C.-H. Ngai, "Fragment of Interest: Personalized Video Fragment Recommendation with Inter-Fragment & Intra-Fragment Contextual Effect," ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), accepted for publication and posted online as at October 24, 2024 (DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700645).
• Z. Ning, P. Dong, X. Wang, S. Wang, X. Hu, S. Guo, T. Qiu, B. Hu, and Y.-K. Kwok, “Distributed and Dynamic Service Placement in Pervasive Edge Computing Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 1277-1292, June 2021 (DOI: 10.1109/TPDS.2020.3046000).
• Z. Ning, K. Zhang, X. Wang, L. Guo, X. Hu, J. Hung, B. Hu, and Y.-K. Kwok, “Intelligent Edge Computing in Internet of Vehicles: A Joint Computation Offloading and Caching Solution,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 2212-2225, April 2021 (DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2020.2997832).
• Z. Ning, P. Dong, X. Wang, X. Hu, L. Guo, B. Hu, Y. Guo, T. Qiu, and Y.-K. Kwok, “Mobile Edge Computing Enabled 5G Health Monitoring for Internet of Medical Things: A Decentralized Game Theoretic Approach,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 463-478, February 2021 (DOI: 10.1109/JSAC.2020.3020645).
• Z. Ning, P. Dong, X. Wang, X. Hu, J. Liu, L. Guo, B. Hu, Y.-K. Kwok, and V. C. M. Leung, “Partial Computation Offloading and Adaptive Task Scheduling for 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, September 2020 (DOI: 10.1109/TMC.2020.3025116).
• Z. Ning, K. Zhang, X. Wang, M. S. Obaidat, L. Guo, X. Hu, B. Hu, Y. Guo, B. Sadoun, and Y.-K. Kwok, “Joint Computing and Caching in 5G-Envisioned Internet of Vehicles: A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Traffic Control System,” IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, pp. 1-12, February 2020 (DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2020.2970276).
• Z. Ning, P. Dong, X. Wang, L. Guo, J. Rodrigues, X. Kong, J. Huang, and Y.-K. Kwok, “Deep Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Internet of Vehicles: An Energy-Efficient Computational Offloading Scheme,” IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 1060-1072, December 2019 (DOI: 10.1109/TCCN.2019.2930521).
• X. Wang, Z. Ning, X. Hu, E. C.-H. Ngai, L. Wang, B. Hu, and Y.-K. Kwok, “A City-Wide Real-Time Traffic Management System: Enabling Crowdsensing in Social Internet of Vehicles,” IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 56, no. 9, pp. 19-25, September 2018 (DOI: 10.1109/MCOM.2018.1701065).
• B. H. K. Chen, P. Y. S. Cheung, P. Y. K. Cheung, and Y.-K. Kwok. “CypherDB: A Novel Architecture for Outsourcing Secure Database Processing,” IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 372-386, April-June 2018 (DOI: 10.1109/TCC.2015.2511730).
• J. Deng and Y.-K. Kwok, “Large Vocabulary Automatic Chord Estimation Using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network with Even Chance Training,” Journal of New Music Research, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 53-67, October 2017.
• D. Guo, Y.-K. Kwok, and X. Jin, “Valuation of Information and the Associated Overpayment Problem in Peer-to-Peer Systems,” Computer Communications, vol. 80, pp. 59-71, April 2016.
• X. Hu, J. Deng, J. Zhao, W. Hu, E. C.-H. Ngai, R. Wang, J. Shen, M. Liang, X. Li, V. C. M. Leung, and Y.-K. Kwok, “SAfeDJ: A Crowd-Cloud Co-Design Approach to Situation-Aware Music Delivery for Drivers,” ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, vol. 12, no. 1S, October 2015 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2808201).
• X. Jin and Y.-K. Kwok, “Network Aware Peer-to-Peer Media Streaming: Capacity or Proximity?,” Computer Networks, vol. 69, pp. 1-18, August 2014.

Selected Professional & Community Services

• Member, Accreditation Board, The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (HKIE)
• Member, Council, HKU SPACE Po Leung Kuk Stanley Ho Community College
• Member, Board of Directors, HKU SPACE
• Member, Fellows Committee, IEEE Computer Society

Modified Date: 28 Oct, 2024
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