Interview with Dr Angus Cheong

Dr Angus Cheong was born in 1972 in a small Guangdong village in China. When Angus was ten years old, his mother took him and one of her younger sisters to settle down in Macau, where they lived in their uncle’s house. His father and his other younger sister joined them four years later. Angus described it as a dramatic change for the whole family. His mother had to work to support the family and he and his siblings had to lead new school life. However, Angus soon enjoyed his life and studies in the city.

At the age of twelve, Angus worked outside of school hours to earn more money for the family. At that time, Macau’s economy was dominantly dependent on the gaming industry, while the incense making, the plastic manufacturing, the watch assembly and the garment manufacturing were the other supplementary industries that contributed to the local employment. Angus explained: “Macau is the neighbour of Hong Kong which was the manufacturing centre during my childhood period. We benefited from this proximity because some of the factory manual work processes were done in Macau. Many young people helped their families by taking the plastic flowers and the watchbands back home and assembled the products at home and then delivered them back to the factories. That was how most of the kids spent the childhood; we went to school and enjoyed our hobbies. I played table tennis at school   and work at home after school.”

At school, Angus was a high flyer and gained a scholarship. He went on to study for a degree at the University of Macau to study English Communications. He said: “The programme looked quite interesting which covered technology-oriented courses, communication skills courses, language courses, etc, like things I was doing in high school and when I was working part-time in a company, so it was quite natural for me to choose that.”

While he was at the university, Angus became president of the Communications Society, a subsidiary of the Student Union. He said of it: “It’s one of my personalities that I like to be pioneer. I like to be a pathfinder.  The Communications Society was one of the big tasks I went through by gathering enthusiastic classmates together to promote communications to the other students. We published the campus newspaper, organized visits to the media orgnizations, ran the campus live radio programmes and so on.”

Angus continued, adding: “The newspaper received a lot of attention because it was the first of its kind in both Chinese and English.  Two of our lecturers were from the UK and we learnt from them about the publication.  Our newspaper was not just words. Our articles were accompanied with photos and cartoons. It had different sections with their own themes. It did not look simply a traditional campus newspaper, but a real newspaper.” Most importantly, the Society offered the opportunity for Angus to meet his girlfriend and then wife who was also the executive member of the Society. They have two children who are currently staying in the UK for work and studies.

Angus recalled the time of choosing his university major, “I was facing two options: computing and communications. I was interested in knowing why and how we can apply the programming techniques or skills to help people to work efficiently and effectively.  But I gradually found myself with more interest in communications and the media industry. ”

Angus bought his first computer in the late eighties with the money he saved from the award of a Macau open essay writing competition after watching recorded educational videos. He said: “I’m not a computer guy, but everything around me is related with technology. In the last year of my high school, I worked as a part-time in a company which sold office equipment, including PBX telephone systems, photocopiers, fax machines and so on. They offered me the post of a salesperson but I was not really doing salesmanship. I was doing the translation of the user manual from English to Chinese. I was also asked to train our clients to use the equipment. That’s how I learnt the skills of operating the PBX telephone system, the fax machines and other office equipment. That’s how I became quite skilful at things. At school we were taught some computer languages like Fortran, C and BASIC.  I still remember we were using DOS. So a lot of different experiences made me fond of technologies.”

In 1995, after completing his degree, Angus started working for a computer monitor manufacturer producing CRT displays. He said: “I joined a Macau-based company which had a factory in the mainland. I was recruited as a marketing executive because in the company not many staff spoke English, and the factory needed people to communicate with the suppliers of the CRT from South Korea.”

In 1996, Angus returned to the University of Macau as a teaching assistant, a role he had been told about by a former university professor. The university was expanding and recruiting local people as teaching assistants in preparation for Macau’s return to mainland China in 1999. Angus added: “I was invited to apply for the post. I thought why not give it a try because the prospect looked quite good for me.”

A year after working in the University of Macau, Angus applied successfully for the Master of Arts in Communications in Hong Kong, which was part of the teaching assistant scheme in order to allow him to be promoted to professor. He explained: “I started my career in the University of Macau as a teaching assistant.  As an academic, I need to get a higher degree in order to be promoted to be professor. Otherwise, you will stay for just a few years and then you will be out. At that time most of the teaching staff in the university were from either Hong Kong or overseas. To encourage local people to join the faculty and equip themselves better to become professors, every faculty had the teaching assistant programme and several of my classmates also joined it.”

In 2003, Angus, Prof. Zhongshi Guo (his supervisor and mentor) and Prof. Huailin Chen (his former colleague in the University of Macau) were awarded the Elizabeth Nelson Prize by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) for their paper: Media’s Routine Contribution to the Symbolic Meaning of National Identity in China.

Angus proudly said: “It’s a great achievement in my teaching career. It’s a co-authored paper with my PhD supervisor and mentor. This research paper was based on a large-scale survey in four cities. The significance of the paper was the large-scaled surveys and the media effects that we were looking at. We found something interesting about how people used the newspaper and used the media to form their perception of the national identity and nationalism.”

The paper was indeed the start of Angus’ interest in understanding people’s behaviour and attitudes. He added: “Surveys were one of the methodologies that you can use to achieve that goal. When I was studying at the Hong Kong Baptist University, my supervisor was an expert in that area of media consumption and media effects. Basically those people who are doing the media effects and media consumption rely on surveys, interviews etc, so I started to work on that area and I became very fond of the methodology part.”

“Later on at the University of Macau I initiated the establishment of the polling centre, or what they called the laboratory of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI).  I was in charge of that laboratory and started to work on the surveys and general polling. At that time we used the system from a US company, but the system didn’t have the Chinese version, so I need to communicate quite a lot with their technicians. They worked out the Chinese version later on. I helped them quite a lot in the process and became very familiar with the architect of the server system. I’m not a technical person but I’m very interested in knowing and understanding the logic and the architecture behind it.”

Angus’ work on gauging of public opinion was ground-breaking at that time by moving the use of surveys into new areas and a new realm through technology. Angus said: “The internet was open to the public in 1995 in Macau and we started to use it. Approximately in 2000, the internet became quite a big phenomenon in the area and by chance I met one of the professors from Hong Kong who was working with a group of people from all around the world on a global project called World Internet Project.”

“I was very interested in the project as it used surveys to study people’s usage of the internet.  During my university, I acquired most of the knowledge about the traditional media such as newspapers, broadcasting, TV and radio. The internet was very new and it was very profound and inspiring stuff for me. With much interest and self-motivation, I joined the project and as I was in charge of the laboratory I therefore had the resources to work on the surveys. I’m actually very technology-oriented, the internet being one of them.”

Upon joining the project Angus met Professor Bill Dutton from Oxford Internet Institute, who was also a key member of the project. Angus continued to work on the World Internet Project until 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. The project celebrates its twenty-two years anniversary and Angus continues to host its official website.

 

Asked what changes he has observed to the way we use the internet today since starting his research, Angus said: “It has changed dramatically in terms of life, economy and politics.  It has socially, culturally and politically changed people’s life.  It has also helped to boost the development and advancement of technologies, especially AI, cloud computing, machine learning, Internet of Things, smart cities, etc. The internet is the backbone of everything for these advancements.”

Having spent thirteen years working in academia, in 2009 Angus left to found his start-up e-Research Solutions (ERS) in Macau, which in 2017 saw the launch of a second company, uMax Data Technology, in Hong Kong.

He said of the change of direction: “I wanted to apply the knowledge that I gained from academia into practice. I saw something that I could contribute to which was not quite popular at that time.  For example, I did surveys, I did polling, I did interviews, but in 2009 I saw that we could have a new way of understanding people through their comments expressed on forums which were popular at the time. Unfortunately, at the university there were no such resources or opportunities for me to work on.  At that time, we still didn’t call it the big data. We just called it opinions mining or web (content) mining. Though we didn’t say there are some unstructured textual data there then, but we can find meaningful insights out of the comments with the help of information technologies.”

He continued to explain how his vision for his start-up grew: “You need a larger set-up and more resources to do that, especially if you want these unstructured data to be transformed into variables. We need to process it in real time manner.  It’s not several months’ or years’ research. It’s a very practical thing.” Angus called this online textual web mining. He continued: “So if I can combine the offline surveys and the online web mining then I can have a fuller picture of what people are talking about, what people’s behaviour and attitudes towards an issue, a product, an image, and anything.  So that’s how I projected there be an opportunity and I decided to move on and left the university to start my business.”

Asked about the difficulties he experienced in setting up, particularly on the financial front, he added: “It was not easy.  I was lucky at that time because I had some consulting projects to the government departments and some commercial companies while I was still teaching at the university.  I had experience because I was in charge of the laboratory. I had experience of communicating with those people of how to transform an academic paper to a practical report.  When I started up my company, I actually had some kind of connection with the industries and some government units; it was a good start for me to have some kind of projects in hand and easier for me to take the business lead.”

In starting his company, Angus employed two of his MA students. He added: “In terms of financial situation at that time, it was not a big issue for me because we were small, just a team of three people. It was not very big ambitions at that time. I just wanted to work it out.”

The team built its own systems to analyse unstructured textual data. Angus said: “There was no system for us to analyse unstructured textual data in Chinese language in the market then, so I thought why not create one for ourselves. At that time we didn’t have data science, so I recruited people from statistics, computer science and then we created our own text mining system.”

To help overcome the lack of manpower in Macau, Angus set up a branch in the mainland city of Zhuhai, adjacent to Macau. He added: “Later on we found that it’s still not enough; we need to recruit more people from different places, like Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore, so we started to think in a bigger picture.”

By 2015, Angus and his team had a system that worked well internally and they started to consider how to transform it into a commercial product.  However, this required them to look for a bigger economy than that of Macau and they opted to open an office in Hong Kong. Angus said: “In Macau our company is called e-Research Solutions, or ERS and in Hong Kong we called it uMax Data Technology because we wanted not only research, but also we wanted to make it as a SaaS product, software as a service.  Then we started to market a text mining product combining the traditional content analysis methodology and the AI technology as well as big data technology.”

Angus described the launch of the business in Hong Kong as difficult to begin with, however, it had quickly established itself and grown steadily during the pandemic and is starting to grow more quickly now.  He added: “I would say we are lucky that our business model has not been affected by the pandemic a lot. It has grown because people rely on the internet more often and our product is for people to understand the online stuff, the comments about a product, about an image, about an issue, so the demand is increasing actually. We target three different sectors: government, commercial and academics.”

Last year saw the registration of the company in Singapore, and Angus hopes that when travel restrictions lift, it will be easier to start the business development operation and to expand.

The company also markets its AI-aided content analysis platform (called DiVoMiner) internationally which is drawing in a number of scholars and postgraduate students to use it to do their research. Angus explained with a smile about the name: “We call it DiVo, because we believe that there should not be Garbage in Garbage out. Instead it should be Data in Value out.”

Asked about the impact of his work, Angus said: “I think AI is very important. It will be crucial to everything; but AI alone is not sufficient.  The integration of AI and human intelligence is more practical and sensible for us to move forward to make meaningful things happen. Especially in our field, when you try to understand people’s behaviour, people’s attitudes, if you rely on AI solely there could be some issues, for example, the accuracy of the meaning, the interpretation of what the data tell you.  AI would help us to enhance the efficiency and from complexity to simplicity, but still in the end, we need people’s intelligence to interpret and to make decisions.  In the area of natural language processing (NLP), if you want to understand people’s mind, you’ve got to combine AI and HI — artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

“With this kind of philosophy we can understand people in an applied manner with the collaboration of proven methodology by academia and AI technology, based on the data we can collect from the internet and other available touch points because they are the comments and these are open data which are not related to privacy or the intrusion of people’s privacy.  There is a very huge potential for us to understand the consumers’ behaviour, perceptions, experiences, in a more efficient and more accurate way.”

Asked about how this understanding can potentially be used to negative effects such as election interfering etc, Angus explained: “There are quite a number of issues that we need to pay attention to, like misinformation, disinformation, fake accounts, which are taking place in the social media era.  Even if you are using the traditional method, there are quite a lot of challenges.  Every day we face so many challenges and we try to find the solutions or reduce the noise as much as we can.”

Asked about the future of this technology, Angus said: “It’s a fast-paced industry. It requires not only what people think about the AI or technology, but also the benefits of technology and AI, especially cloud computing, distributive storage, computational power and the advancement of the integrated system. The cloud-based platform can help us move much quickly in collecting, collating, analysing and visualising data.

“In terms of the business model, you can now pay-as-you-use, while in the past you need to buy a system and if you wanted to expand the capacity of your system, you need to wait and spend a lot. Things have changed tremendously.  As long as you have the budget money, you just pay online immediately and then the service can be expanded and upgraded.  So the business model will dramatically change the way we serve and the way people use products, benefitting both the provider and the users.

“Also, it can be applied to more diversified areas.  Our team is now developing a more integrated platform for cross-platforms, cross-channels and mixed-format of data mining in customer experiences.  For example, if you are a big brand name or if you are a service centre of the government, you have many touchpoints with your customers or citizens, like reception, email, telephone, social media etc, so it’s very much the combination of the data from inside and outside of the organisation.  You need to have the techniques, the technologies and the algorithms to converge these various touchpoints and integrate them to benefit almost all different sectors in the world.”

Offering advice to young people considering working in technology, Angus said: “The journey for a person in this field is quite lengthy.  From data collection to the dissemination of your visualised results there are so many steps along this journey.  If you are a computer scientist it’s an area that you use your knowledge and techniques quite well. But we also need people from social sciences, psychology, public administration, marketing, communication, education, etc. It is therefore a cross-discipline area. I encourage that young people should not think that this business is only one single field. On the contrary, it is an industry with cross disciplines. And we indeed need different kinds of talents.”

“When I was at the university I would never think that one day I would have my own product or system or platform, in both the commercial and the academic aspects.  Now I can market my product internationally, which is something I am really proud of.  I’m pleased with myself and I’m proud of my team which is composed of tens of hardworking talents. Hopefully, it will be one of the quality products for people who want to work, analyse or do research with both unstructured and structured data, no matter what industry they are in and no matter what discipline they come from. Being an academic person myself, I hope that one day maybe in five years’ time, I can realize my academic aspirations again in campus, contribute in research work and share my industry experience with colleagues and students.”

INterviewed by Jane Bird

Transcript by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley