Hubert Tsz-Hong Chan

Hubert Tsz-Hong Chan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing and Data Science at The University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD in 2007 from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Anupam Gupta, followed by post-doctoral research at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik (2007-2009).

Education

• PhD in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2007

Research Interests

Dr Chan's research lies at the intersection of algorithms, combinatorial optimisation, discrete metric spaces, and security & privacy. A recurring theme is the design of provably efficient approximation algorithms for geometric and graph-theoretic problems under realistic or adversarial settings. Representative contributions include polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTAS) for TSP and Steiner Forest in doubling metrics, spectral analysis of hypergraph Laplacians, and foundational work on differential obliviousness and oblivious RAM.

Publications & Trends

With more than 80 peer-reviewed papers in premier venues such as JACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, Algorithmica, FOCS, SODA, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, CCS, and WWW, his recent output (2018-2021) demonstrates a shift toward privacy-preserving algorithms, differential obliviousness, and socially-aware optimisation models, often combining rigorous theory with practical datasets like Netflix and Twitter.

Scientific Awards

• IPDPS 2019 Best Paper Award
• WWW 2018 Honorable Mention

Students & Mentoring

Dr Chan has successfully graduated 17 PhD and MPhil students and currently mentors 7 PhD candidates and 1 MPhil student. His graduates have secured academic and industry positions worldwide, and their theses frequently build on his funded projects.

Research Funding & Labs

Since 2012 he has been Principal Investigator on 12 competitive grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), totalling more than HK$8 million, spanning topics from privacy-preserving aggregation to Byzantine-resilient federated learning. While no dedicated laboratory name is advertised, his group operates within the Security & Privacy and Algorithms Labs in the Department of Computer Science.