Alvin Kwan | The University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)
Papers by Alvin Kwan
European Conference on Games Based Learning
Research on players’ reasons for video gaming, their video game preferences, and the behavioural ... more Research on players’ reasons for video gaming, their video game preferences, and the behavioural effects of video gaming on the players tends to study those issues separately. This study attempts to explore all those issues collectively with the aim of facilitating game designers to develop appealing educational games for university students without inflicting negative behavioural impacts on the students. Relevant data from 100 undergraduates were collected from an online survey. Cluster analysis of the eight major reasons for playing video games resulted in grouping the respondents into five clusters. The cluster that rated peer effect as the major reason for playing is male-dominated whereas the cluster that rated family influence as the major reason is female-dominated. A similar analysis of the respondents’ video game genre preferences reveals that the cluster favouring fighting and battle games is male-dominated, whereas the cluster favouring family entertainment games is fe...
![Research paper thumbnail of [CD-ROM]. Hong Kong, Dec 3-4, 2009. USING BLOGS TO SUPPORT INTERNSHIP FOR INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND NURSING STUDENTS](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/96150146/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This paper sought to compare the effectiveness of blogging between two groups of internship stude... more This paper sought to compare the effectiveness of blogging between two groups of internship students from different professional areas: nursing and information management. The findings show that both groups of students reported blogs as an effective and satisfactory tool in facilitating knowledge, information, emotional sharing and communication. However, differences were observed in the perceptions of the blogs’ effectiveness in emotional support and learning from others’ problem solving experience where nursing students reported more positive perceptions than the information management students. Differences were also noted in the commenting patterns between the two groups which show better feedback from the nursing students in general. The reported differences were observed to be related to the nature of the tasks inherent to their professional fields. Moreover, frequent users also have better perception of the use of blogs, regardless of their fields, which indicate the need of a...
2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2017
This paper introduces the development of ShefCE: a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus from... more This paper introduces the development of ShefCE: a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus from L2 English speakers in Hong Kong. Bilingual parallel recording materials were chosen from TED online lectures. Script selection were carried out according to bilingual consistency (evaluated using a machine translation system) and the distribution balance of phonemes. 31 undergraduate to postgraduate students in Hong Kong aged 20–30 were recruited and recorded a 25-hour speech corpus (12 hours in Cantonese and 13 hours in English). Baseline phoneme/syllable recognition systems were trained on background data with and without the ShefCE training data. The final syllable error rate (SER) for Cantonese is 17.3% and final phoneme error rate (PER) for English is 34.5%. The automatic speech recognition performance on English showed a significant mismatch when applying L1 models on L2 data, suggesting the need for explicit accent adaptation. ShefCE and the corresponding baseline models will be...
The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: s... more The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: sources of information and knowledge used; reasons for selecting these sources; ways of verifying the appropriateness of retrieved information; stopping the search process; and the effect of locus of control and learning style on their information seeking behaviour. Results show that the internet and colleagues were the most common sources of information, while contacts outside the organisation were also important. Interns’ existing tacit knowledge ranked low as a source of information. Convenience of access to the sources of information and confidence in them were major determinants of the source chosen. Respondents with an internal locus of control were more satisfied with the types of information and with the amount of information retrieved, than those with an external locus of control.
Paper PresentationSymposium Theme: Learning without Limits?Track: Technology-Supported Profession... more Paper PresentationSymposium Theme: Learning without Limits?Track: Technology-Supported Professional LearningParallel Session 2Although prior studies showed that blogs and Facebook could probably support knowledge management in experience capture and information dissemination (Stiler & Philleo, 2003), very few studies have been done to investigate, compare and contrast the knowledge management process using blogs and Facebook despite the differences in how social interactions are conducted in the two social media platforms. This study aims at addressing such a gap by adopting a mixed method research design which includes a qualitative content analysis of blogs/Facebook entries and a quantitative comparison of user perception
This research applied two online tools (Mahara and PBworks) to help facilitate the academic advis... more This research applied two online tools (Mahara and PBworks) to help facilitate the academic advising process for students in a Hong Kong university. Academic advising tries to help students clarifying their various goals, developing plans to achieve these goals and evaluating their own progress. Each student was assigned with an academic advisor and a student advisor and they were asked to write on Mahara and PBworks to set their goals, develop plans to achieve the goals and evaluate their own progress with guidance from the advisor. The paper will discuss the effectiveness of applying the tools.
The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: s... more The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: sources of information and knowledge used; reasons for selecting these sources; ways of verifying the appropriateness of retrieved information; stopping the search process; and the effect of locus of control and learning style on their information seeking behaviour. Results show that the internet and colleagues were the most common sources of information, while contacts outside the organisation were also important. Interns’ existing tacit knowledge ranked low as a source of information. Convenience of access to the sources of information and confidence in them were major determinants of the source chosen. Respondents with an internal locus of control were more satisfied with the types of information and with the amount of information retrieved, than those with an external locus of control. This exploratory small scale study investigates the information seeking and stopping behavior of und...
2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE), 2019
This research concerns how online academic help-seeking behaviors of undergraduate students affec... more This research concerns how online academic help-seeking behaviors of undergraduate students affect their self-learning. A survey was conducted with 104 undergraduate students from a university in Hong Kong. Six respondents who misconceived that they had learned a topic or concept online adequately but found they actually did not in subsequent assessments were interviewed in order to understand their online learning experiences in depth. An analysis of the results reveals that the availability of abundance of learning resources and the ease of accessibility of those resources on the Internet is a two-edged sword. Students who considered their assignment tasks being mainly skill-based, e.g. engineering students, tend to be associated with a less disciplined use of the Internet in their study and are less likely to be able to achieve higher level learning goals. Potential remedies to the problem are suggested.
Several studies in Hong Kong have examined the learning behaviours of Hong Kong part time student... more Several studies in Hong Kong have examined the learning behaviours of Hong Kong part time students. This paper presents findings from a larger study completed at the University of Hong Kong Bachelor of Education program. Data collected helped instructors in the program to gain insight into the busy life of the Hong Kong teacher working, post-service towards a BEd in Library and Information Science. The findings will be used in an action research cycle framing attempts to continually improve teaching practice by meeting the needs of part-time students. Impact of the study on part-time students prefer a combination of flexible and face-to-face teaching. Findings will also be informative for other part-time program using a combination of flexible and traditional teaching and learning models.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1996
There are many new methods for solving constraint satisfaction problems proposed in recent years.... more There are many new methods for solving constraint satisfaction problems proposed in recent years. Due to their complexity, a theoretical analysis on their average-case behaviours seems to be very difficult. Researchers tend to adopt an empirical approach to evaluate constraint satisfaction techniques. When empirical results are ready, statistical techniques are often employed for analysis. The question is which statistics to use. Some recent research uses parametric tests such as t-test and ANOVA. However those tests assume that the characteristic of the normal curve can be applied. In this paper, we provide evidence that the normality assumption is often not valid in the results produced by a range of constraint satisfaction algorithm-heuristic combinations on random binary constraint satisfaction problems and 3-colouring problems, particularly when a problem is within the "mushy region", which are popular benchmark problems for evaluating CSP methods. The failure of normality assumption highlights the need for some statistics which do not rely on the normality assumption to analyse empirical results from CSP research. We believe that nonparametric techniques could be the right tools for the purpose.
Open Source Mobile …, 2011
An Extendible Simulation Game to Promote Team Spirit on Mobile Computing Devices (9781466600119):... more An Extendible Simulation Game to Promote Team Spirit on Mobile Computing Devices (9781466600119): Vincent Tam, Zexian Liao, CH Leung, Lawrence Yeung, ACM Kwan: Book Chapters.
Using blogs to support internship for information management and nursing students.
Design and Application of Hybrid Intelligent Systems, 2003
Google, Inc. (search), Subscribe (Full Service), Register (Limited Service, Free), Login. Search:... more Google, Inc. (search), Subscribe (Full Service), Register (Limited Service, Free), Login. Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide. ...
Many new algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems have been proposed in recent yea... more Many new algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems have been proposed in recent years. Their performance is usually compared with some other algorithms by measuring the number of compatibility checks or the cpu time that the algorithms need for solving a predetermined set of problems. There are some studies which compare algorithms without using any variable ordering heuristics. We argue that evaluating algorithms without considering their combinations with variable ordering heuristic could produce misleading results. We advocate that algorithm-heuristic combinations should be compared instead of algorithms alone.
Constraint satisfaction has received great attention in recent years and a large number of algori... more Constraint satisfaction has received great attention in recent years and a large number of algorithms have been developed. Unfortunately, from the problem solvers' point of view, it is very difficult to see when and how to use these algorithms. This paper points out the need to map constraint satisfaction problems to constraint satisfaction algorithms and heuristics, and proposes that more research should be done on how to retrieve the most efficient and effective algorithms and heuristics for a given problem. We claim that such algorithms/heuristics retrieval systems should also be valuable to guide future research.
Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, 1996
Recently Dent and Mercer have introduced an algorithm called minimal forward checking (MFC) which... more Recently Dent and Mercer have introduced an algorithm called minimal forward checking (MFC) which always performs no worse than forward checking (FC) in terms of number of compatibility checks and node expanded given the same variable and value orderings. In this paper ...
Constraint satisfaction is the core of many AI and real life problems and much research has been ... more Constraint satisfaction is the core of many AI and real life problems and much research has been done in this field in recent years. Work has been done in the past on comparing the performance of different algorithms and heuristics. Much of such work has focused on finding "the best" algorithm and heuristic combination for all problems. The objective of
Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE), 2013
ABSTRACT Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than rese... more ABSTRACT Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than research that attempts to address broader issues in learning of database. This paper proposes a lesson planning approach for an introductory database course based on selected principles of the minimalist instructional design and the ARCS model of motivational design. The basic idea is to design action oriented lessons in a way to involve student participation as early as possible and to foster confidence of students in the learning process. The adoption of the approach results in an ordering of database topics which is significantly different from mainstream practices.
European Conference on Games Based Learning
Research on players’ reasons for video gaming, their video game preferences, and the behavioural ... more Research on players’ reasons for video gaming, their video game preferences, and the behavioural effects of video gaming on the players tends to study those issues separately. This study attempts to explore all those issues collectively with the aim of facilitating game designers to develop appealing educational games for university students without inflicting negative behavioural impacts on the students. Relevant data from 100 undergraduates were collected from an online survey. Cluster analysis of the eight major reasons for playing video games resulted in grouping the respondents into five clusters. The cluster that rated peer effect as the major reason for playing is male-dominated whereas the cluster that rated family influence as the major reason is female-dominated. A similar analysis of the respondents’ video game genre preferences reveals that the cluster favouring fighting and battle games is male-dominated, whereas the cluster favouring family entertainment games is fe...
This paper sought to compare the effectiveness of blogging between two groups of internship stude... more This paper sought to compare the effectiveness of blogging between two groups of internship students from different professional areas: nursing and information management. The findings show that both groups of students reported blogs as an effective and satisfactory tool in facilitating knowledge, information, emotional sharing and communication. However, differences were observed in the perceptions of the blogs’ effectiveness in emotional support and learning from others’ problem solving experience where nursing students reported more positive perceptions than the information management students. Differences were also noted in the commenting patterns between the two groups which show better feedback from the nursing students in general. The reported differences were observed to be related to the nature of the tasks inherent to their professional fields. Moreover, frequent users also have better perception of the use of blogs, regardless of their fields, which indicate the need of a...
2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2017
This paper introduces the development of ShefCE: a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus from... more This paper introduces the development of ShefCE: a Cantonese-English bilingual speech corpus from L2 English speakers in Hong Kong. Bilingual parallel recording materials were chosen from TED online lectures. Script selection were carried out according to bilingual consistency (evaluated using a machine translation system) and the distribution balance of phonemes. 31 undergraduate to postgraduate students in Hong Kong aged 20–30 were recruited and recorded a 25-hour speech corpus (12 hours in Cantonese and 13 hours in English). Baseline phoneme/syllable recognition systems were trained on background data with and without the ShefCE training data. The final syllable error rate (SER) for Cantonese is 17.3% and final phoneme error rate (PER) for English is 34.5%. The automatic speech recognition performance on English showed a significant mismatch when applying L1 models on L2 data, suggesting the need for explicit accent adaptation. ShefCE and the corresponding baseline models will be...
The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: s... more The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: sources of information and knowledge used; reasons for selecting these sources; ways of verifying the appropriateness of retrieved information; stopping the search process; and the effect of locus of control and learning style on their information seeking behaviour. Results show that the internet and colleagues were the most common sources of information, while contacts outside the organisation were also important. Interns’ existing tacit knowledge ranked low as a source of information. Convenience of access to the sources of information and confidence in them were major determinants of the source chosen. Respondents with an internal locus of control were more satisfied with the types of information and with the amount of information retrieved, than those with an external locus of control.
Paper PresentationSymposium Theme: Learning without Limits?Track: Technology-Supported Profession... more Paper PresentationSymposium Theme: Learning without Limits?Track: Technology-Supported Professional LearningParallel Session 2Although prior studies showed that blogs and Facebook could probably support knowledge management in experience capture and information dissemination (Stiler & Philleo, 2003), very few studies have been done to investigate, compare and contrast the knowledge management process using blogs and Facebook despite the differences in how social interactions are conducted in the two social media platforms. This study aims at addressing such a gap by adopting a mixed method research design which includes a qualitative content analysis of blogs/Facebook entries and a quantitative comparison of user perception
This research applied two online tools (Mahara and PBworks) to help facilitate the academic advis... more This research applied two online tools (Mahara and PBworks) to help facilitate the academic advising process for students in a Hong Kong university. Academic advising tries to help students clarifying their various goals, developing plans to achieve these goals and evaluating their own progress. Each student was assigned with an academic advisor and a student advisor and they were asked to write on Mahara and PBworks to set their goals, develop plans to achieve the goals and evaluate their own progress with guidance from the advisor. The paper will discuss the effectiveness of applying the tools.
The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: s... more The information seeking behaviour of student interns was investigated from the perspectives of: sources of information and knowledge used; reasons for selecting these sources; ways of verifying the appropriateness of retrieved information; stopping the search process; and the effect of locus of control and learning style on their information seeking behaviour. Results show that the internet and colleagues were the most common sources of information, while contacts outside the organisation were also important. Interns’ existing tacit knowledge ranked low as a source of information. Convenience of access to the sources of information and confidence in them were major determinants of the source chosen. Respondents with an internal locus of control were more satisfied with the types of information and with the amount of information retrieved, than those with an external locus of control. This exploratory small scale study investigates the information seeking and stopping behavior of und...
2019 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Education (TALE), 2019
This research concerns how online academic help-seeking behaviors of undergraduate students affec... more This research concerns how online academic help-seeking behaviors of undergraduate students affect their self-learning. A survey was conducted with 104 undergraduate students from a university in Hong Kong. Six respondents who misconceived that they had learned a topic or concept online adequately but found they actually did not in subsequent assessments were interviewed in order to understand their online learning experiences in depth. An analysis of the results reveals that the availability of abundance of learning resources and the ease of accessibility of those resources on the Internet is a two-edged sword. Students who considered their assignment tasks being mainly skill-based, e.g. engineering students, tend to be associated with a less disciplined use of the Internet in their study and are less likely to be able to achieve higher level learning goals. Potential remedies to the problem are suggested.
Several studies in Hong Kong have examined the learning behaviours of Hong Kong part time student... more Several studies in Hong Kong have examined the learning behaviours of Hong Kong part time students. This paper presents findings from a larger study completed at the University of Hong Kong Bachelor of Education program. Data collected helped instructors in the program to gain insight into the busy life of the Hong Kong teacher working, post-service towards a BEd in Library and Information Science. The findings will be used in an action research cycle framing attempts to continually improve teaching practice by meeting the needs of part-time students. Impact of the study on part-time students prefer a combination of flexible and face-to-face teaching. Findings will also be informative for other part-time program using a combination of flexible and traditional teaching and learning models.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1996
There are many new methods for solving constraint satisfaction problems proposed in recent years.... more There are many new methods for solving constraint satisfaction problems proposed in recent years. Due to their complexity, a theoretical analysis on their average-case behaviours seems to be very difficult. Researchers tend to adopt an empirical approach to evaluate constraint satisfaction techniques. When empirical results are ready, statistical techniques are often employed for analysis. The question is which statistics to use. Some recent research uses parametric tests such as t-test and ANOVA. However those tests assume that the characteristic of the normal curve can be applied. In this paper, we provide evidence that the normality assumption is often not valid in the results produced by a range of constraint satisfaction algorithm-heuristic combinations on random binary constraint satisfaction problems and 3-colouring problems, particularly when a problem is within the "mushy region", which are popular benchmark problems for evaluating CSP methods. The failure of normality assumption highlights the need for some statistics which do not rely on the normality assumption to analyse empirical results from CSP research. We believe that nonparametric techniques could be the right tools for the purpose.
Open Source Mobile …, 2011
An Extendible Simulation Game to Promote Team Spirit on Mobile Computing Devices (9781466600119):... more An Extendible Simulation Game to Promote Team Spirit on Mobile Computing Devices (9781466600119): Vincent Tam, Zexian Liao, CH Leung, Lawrence Yeung, ACM Kwan: Book Chapters.
Using blogs to support internship for information management and nursing students.
Design and Application of Hybrid Intelligent Systems, 2003
Google, Inc. (search), Subscribe (Full Service), Register (Limited Service, Free), Login. Search:... more Google, Inc. (search), Subscribe (Full Service), Register (Limited Service, Free), Login. Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide. ...
Many new algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems have been proposed in recent yea... more Many new algorithms for solving constraint satisfaction problems have been proposed in recent years. Their performance is usually compared with some other algorithms by measuring the number of compatibility checks or the cpu time that the algorithms need for solving a predetermined set of problems. There are some studies which compare algorithms without using any variable ordering heuristics. We argue that evaluating algorithms without considering their combinations with variable ordering heuristic could produce misleading results. We advocate that algorithm-heuristic combinations should be compared instead of algorithms alone.
Constraint satisfaction has received great attention in recent years and a large number of algori... more Constraint satisfaction has received great attention in recent years and a large number of algorithms have been developed. Unfortunately, from the problem solvers' point of view, it is very difficult to see when and how to use these algorithms. This paper points out the need to map constraint satisfaction problems to constraint satisfaction algorithms and heuristics, and proposes that more research should be done on how to retrieve the most efficient and effective algorithms and heuristics for a given problem. We claim that such algorithms/heuristics retrieval systems should also be valuable to guide future research.
Proceedings Eighth IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, 1996
Recently Dent and Mercer have introduced an algorithm called minimal forward checking (MFC) which... more Recently Dent and Mercer have introduced an algorithm called minimal forward checking (MFC) which always performs no worse than forward checking (FC) in terms of number of compatibility checks and node expanded given the same variable and value orderings. In this paper ...
Constraint satisfaction is the core of many AI and real life problems and much research has been ... more Constraint satisfaction is the core of many AI and real life problems and much research has been done in this field in recent years. Work has been done in the past on comparing the performance of different algorithms and heuristics. Much of such work has focused on finding "the best" algorithm and heuristic combination for all problems. The objective of
Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE), 2013
ABSTRACT Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than rese... more ABSTRACT Research addressing learning of individual database topics is much more common than research that attempts to address broader issues in learning of database. This paper proposes a lesson planning approach for an introductory database course based on selected principles of the minimalist instructional design and the ARCS model of motivational design. The basic idea is to design action oriented lessons in a way to involve student participation as early as possible and to foster confidence of students in the learning process. The adoption of the approach results in an ordering of database topics which is significantly different from mainstream practices.