Alton Chua Yeow Kuan

Associate Chair (Research)
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Alton Chua is Associate Professor and currently Associate Chair (Research) at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Between 2011 and 2014, he was Program Director of the Master of Science (Information Systems).

An award-winning scholar, he has published close to 200 scholarly articles in these areas. Among the several accolades he received in recent years include 2014 Outstanding Paper Award from the Journal of Knowledge Management, 2014 Highly Commended Paper Award from Online Information Review, 2015 Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Internet Computing & Web Services, and the 2017 Highly Commended Paper Award from the Journal of Intellectual Capital. He also won the 2016 Nanyang Education Award (School) from the university for his teaching excellence.

Research Interests

Dr Chua’s research interests lie mainly in information and knowledge management, with a particular focus on user-generated content. The themes of his research include community question-answering system, online reviews and rumors in social media. For example, he studied the quality of answers submitted to Yahoo!Answers and whether prompt answers were necessarily of good quality. He also investigated the way questions ought to be phrased to maximize their chances of attracting good answers. On online reviews, he has identified a number of factors that make a given reivew helpful to other users. Another related line of inquiry is the distinctions between authentic reviews and fake reviews. Given the prevalence of online rumors in recent times, Dr Chua’s efforts have been trained on understanding the virality of rumors, and how the ill effects of rumors can be curbed through the use of counter-rumors.