Human computation for constraint-based recommenders

PeopleViews is a Human Computation based environment for the construction of constraint-based recommenders. Constraint-based recommender systems support the handling of complex items where constraints (e.g., between user requirements and item properties) can be taken into account. When applying such systems, users are articulating their requirements and the recommender identifies solutions on the basis of the constraints in a recommendation knowledge base. In this paper, we provide an overview of the PeopleViews environment and show how recommendation knowledge can be collected from users of the environment on the basis of micro-tasks. We also show how PeopleViews exploits this knowledge for automatically generating recommendation knowledge bases. In this context, we compare the prediction quality of the recommendation approaches integrated in PeopleViews using a DSLR camera dataset.     

Evaluation of session-based recommendation algorithms

Recommender systems help users find relevant items of interest, for example on e-commerce or media streaming sites. Most academic research is concerned with approaches that personalize the recommendations according to long-term user profiles. In many real-world applications, however, such long-term profiles often do not exist and recommendations therefore have to be made solely based on the observed behavior of a user during an ongoing session. Given the high practical relevance of the problem, an increased interest in this problem can be observed in recent years, leading to a number of proposals for session-based recommendation algorithms that typically aim to predict the user’s immediate next actions. In this work, we present the results of an in-depth performance comparison of a number of such algorithms, using a variety of datasets and evaluation measures. Our comparison includes the most recent approaches based on recurrent neural networks like gru4rec, factorized Markov model approaches such as fism or fossil, as well as simpler methods based, e.g., on nearest neighbor schemes. Our experiments reveal that algorithms of this latter class, despite their sometimes almost trivial nature, often perform equally well or significantly better than today’s more complex approaches based on deep neural networks. Our results therefore suggest that there is substantial room for improvement regarding the development of more sophisticated session-based recommendation algorithms.     

Reverse direction-based surrounder queries for mobile recommendations

This paper proposes a new spatial query called a reverse direction-based surrounder (RDBS) query, which retrieves a user who is seeing a point of interest (POI) as one of their direction-based surrounders (DBSs). According to a user, one POI can be dominated by a second POI if the POIs are directionally close and the first POI is farther from the user than the second is. Two POIs are directionally close if their included angle with respect to the user is smaller than an angular threshold ??. If a POI cannot be dominated by another POI, it is a DBS of the user. We also propose an extended query called competitor RDBS query. POIs that share the same RDBSs with another POI are defined as competitors of that POI. We design algorithms to answer the RDBS queries and competitor queries. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can answer the queries efficiently.     

Time and Location Aware Points of Interest Recommendation in Location-Based Social Networks

The wide spread of location-based social networks brings about a huge volume of user check-in data, which facilitates the recommendation of points of interest (POIs). Recent advances on distributed representation shed light on learning low dimensional dense vectors to alleviate the data sparsity problem. Current studies on representation learning for POI recommendation embed both users and POIs in a common latent space, and users’ preference is inferred based on the distance/similarity between a user and a POI. Such an approach is not in accordance with the semantics of users and POIs as they are inherently different objects. In this paper, we present a novel translation-based, time and location aware (TransTL) representation, which models the spatial and temporal information as a relationship connecting users and POIs. Our model generalizes the recent advances in knowledge graph embedding. The basic idea is that the embedding of a <time, location> pair corresponds to a translation from embeddings of users to POIs. Since the POI embedding should be close to the user embedding plus the relationship vector, the recommendation can be performed by selecting the top-k POIs similar to the translated POI, which are all of the same type of objects. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that our TransTL model achieves the state-of-the-art performance. It is also much more robust to data sparsity than the baselines.     

Integrating tourist packages and tourist attractions for personalized trip planning based on travel constraints

In recent years, with the upgrading of mobile positioning and the popularity of smart devices, location related research gets a lot of attentions. One of popular issues is the trip planning problem. Although many related scientific or technical literature have been proposed, most of them focused only on tourist attraction recommendation or arrangement meeting some user demands. In fact, to grasp the huge tourism opportunities, more and more tour operators design tourist packages and provide to users. Generally, tourist packages have many advantages such as cheaper ticket price and higher transportation convenience. However, researches on trip planning combining tourist packages have not been mentioned in the past studies. In this research, we present a new approach named Package-Attraction-based Trip Planner (PAT-Planner) to simultaneously combine tourist packages and tourist attractions for personalized trip planning satisfying users’ travel constraints. In PAT-Planner, we first based on user preferences and temporal characteristics to design a Score Inference Model for respectively measuring the score of a tourist package or tourist attraction. Then, we develop the Hybrid Trip-Mine algorithm meeting user travel constraints for personalized trip planning. Besides, we further propose two improvement strategies, namely Score Estimation and Score Bound Tightening, based on Hybrid Trip-Mine to speed up the trip planning efficiency. As far as we know, our study is the first attempt to simultaneously combine tourist packages and tourist attractions on trip planning problem. Through a series of experimental evaluations and case studies using the collected Gowalla datasets, PAT-Planner demonstrates excellent planning effects.     

一种基于评分矩阵局部低秩假设融合地理和文本信息的协同排名POI推荐模型*

针对目前LBSN中,用户只对少数兴趣点进行签到,使得用户签到历史数据及其上下文信息（如评论文本）极其稀疏,同时传统的评分推荐系统只考虑用户和评分二元信息,具有一定的局限性。为此,提出一种基于评分矩阵局部低秩假设的局部协同排名兴趣点推荐算法。首先,假设用户-兴趣点矩阵在由用户-兴趣点对所定义度量空间中某些邻域内是低秩;其次,对于地理信息建模采用一种自适应二维核密度方法,然后,对于文本信息利用潜在狄利克雷分配模型挖掘兴趣点相关的文本信息建模用户的兴趣主题;最后,基于局部协同排名模型将兴趣点的地理信息和评论文本信息有效融合。实验结果表明:该模型的性能优于主流先进兴趣点推荐算法。     

基于用户兴趣和兴趣点流行度的个性化旅游路线推荐

针对传统的旅游路线推荐算法推荐准确率不高的缺陷,提出一种基于兴趣点(POI)流行度和用户兴趣偏好的个性化旅游路线推荐(PTIR)算法。首先通过分析得到用户真实的历史旅游足迹;然后根据用户在每个景点的逗留时间提出基于时间的用户兴趣偏好;最后在给定的旅行时间限制、起点和终点下,设计最优旅游路线计算方法。在Flickr社交网站的真实数据集上进行实验,结果显示,相比传统的只考虑POI流行度的算法,该个性化旅游路线推荐算法的准确率和召回率都有较大提升;相比只考虑用户兴趣偏好的算法,该个性化旅游路线推荐算法的准确率和召回率也有所提高。实验结果表明综合考虑POI流行度和用户兴趣偏好能使路线推荐得更准确。     

BSP-Why: A Tool for Deductive Verification of BSP Algorithms with Subgroup Synchronisation

We present bsp-why, a tool for deductive verification of bsp  algorithms with subgroup synchronisation. From bsp  programs, bsp-why generates sequential codes for the back-end condition generator why and thus benefits from its large range of existing provers. By enabling subgroups, the user can prove the correctness of programs that run on hierarchical machines—e.g. clusters of multi-cores. In general, bsp-why is able to generate proof obligations of mpi programs that only use collective operations. Our case studies are distributed state-space construction algorithms, the basis of model-checking.     

A tensor decomposition based collaborative filtering algorithm for time-aware POI recommendation in LBSN

Point of interest (POI) recommendation problem in location based social network (LBSN) is of great importance and the challenge lies in the data sparsity, implicit user feedback and personalized preference. To improve the precision of recommendation, a tensor decomposition based collaborative filtering (TDCF) algorithm is proposed for POI recommendation. Tensor decomposition algorithm is utilized to fill the missing values in tensor (user-category-time). Specifically, locations are replaced by location categories to reduce dimension in the first phase, which effectively solves the problem of data sparsity. In the second phase, we get the preference rating of users to POIs based on time and user similarity computation and hypertext induced topic search (HITS) algorithm with spatial constraints, respectively. Finally the user’s preference score of locations are determined by two items with different weights, and the Top-N locations are the recommendation results for a user to visit at a given time. Experimental results on two LBSN datasets demonstrate that the proposed model gets much higher precision and recall value than the other three recommendation methods.

     

Ecosystem on the Web: non-linear mining and forecasting of co-evolving online activities

Given a large collection of co-evolving online activities, such as searches for the keywords “Xbox”, “PlayStation” and “Wii”, how can we find patterns and rules? Are these keywords related? If so, are they competing against each other? Can we forecast the volume of user activity for the coming month? We conjecture that online activities compete for user attention in the same way that species in an ecosystem compete for food. We present EcoWeb, (i.e., Ecosystem on the Web), which is an intuitive model designed as a non-linear dynamical system for mining large-scale co-evolving online activities. Our second contribution is a novel, parameter-free, and scalable fitting algorithm, EcoWeb-Fit, that estimates the parameters of EcoWeb. Extensive experiments on real data show that EcoWeb is effective, in that it can capture long-range dynamics and meaningful patterns such as seasonalities, and practical, in that it can provide accurate long-range forecasts. EcoWeb consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and execution speed.     

Subdividing Long-Running,Variable-Length Analyses Into Short,Fixed-Length BOINC Workunits

We describe a scheme for subdividing long-running, variable-length analyses into short, fixed-length boinc workunits using phylogenetic analyses as an example. Fixed-length workunits decrease variance in analysis runtime, improve overall system throughput, and make boinc a more useful resource for analyses that require a relatively fast turnaround time, such as the phylogenetic analyses submitted by users of the garli web service at molecularevolution.org. Additionally, we explain why these changes will benefit volunteers who contribute their processing power to boinc projects, such as the Lattice boinc Project (http://boinc.umiacs.umd.edu). Our results, which demonstrate the advantages of relatively short workunits, should be of general interest to anyone who develops and deploys an application on the boinc platform.     

基于位置社交网络的个性化兴趣点推荐

兴趣点(point-of-interest,POI)推荐是基于位置的社交网络(location-based social networks,LBSN)中一项重要的服务。针对目前推荐算法存在的噪声数据影响推荐质量,用户个性化程度低的问题,提出了一种个性化联合推荐算法。提出了引入POI的位置因素去除不可能或可能性较小的POI,形成初步候选集;综合考虑POI的类别、流行度及用户的社会行为,增加用户个性化的程度,提高推荐结果的质量。在Foursquare真实签到数据集上的实验,证明了提出的联合推荐算法与目前先进的算法相比,准确率提高11%,召回率提高8%。     

Metro Transit‐Centric Visualization for City Tour Planning

In general, city trip planning consists of two main steps: knowing Points‐Of‐Interest (POIs), and then planning a tour route from the current point to next preferred POIs. We mainly consider the metro for traveling around touristic cities as the main means of transportation. In this context, existing tools lack a capability to effectively visualize POIs on the metro map for trip planning. To bridge this gap, we propose an interactive framework that holistically combines presentations of POIs and a metro network. Our idea is to identify popular POIs based on visual worth computation, and to introduce POI discovery for effectively identifying POIs within reach of a metro network for users. We use octilinear layouts to highlight the metro network, and show representative POI images in the layout space visualized within a user‐specified viewing window. We have implemented our working prototype showing touristic cities with a metro network. We have factored out various design guidelines that are basis for designing our method, and validated our approach with a user study surveying 70 individuals.     

NScale: neighborhood-centric large-scale graph analytics in the cloud

There is an increasing interest in executing complex analyses over large graphs, many of which require processing a large number of multi-hop neighborhoods or subgraphs. Examples include ego network analysis, motif counting, finding social circles, personalized recommendations, link prediction, anomaly detection, analyzing influence cascades, and others. These tasks are not well served by existing vertex-centric graph processing frameworks, where user programs are only able to directly access the state of a single vertex at a time, resulting in high communication, scheduling, and memory overheads in executing such tasks. Further, most existing graph processing frameworks ignore the challenges in extracting the relevant portions of the graph that an analysis task is interested in, and loading those onto distributed memory. This paper introduces NScale, a novel end-to-end graph processing framework that enables the distributed execution of complex subgraph-centric analytics over large-scale graphs in the cloud. NScale enables users to write programs at the level of subgraphs rather than at the level of vertices. Unlike most previous graph processing frameworks, which apply the user program to the entire graph, NScale allows users to declaratively specify subgraphs of interest. Our framework includes a novel graph extraction and packing (GEP) module that utilizes a cost-based optimizer to partition and pack the subgraphs of interest into memory on as few machines as possible. The distributed execution engine then takes over and runs the user program in parallel on those subgraphs, restricting the scope of the execution appropriately, and utilizes novel techniques to minimize memory consumption by exploiting overlaps among the subgraphs. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation comparing against three state-of-the-art systems, namely Giraph, GraphLab, and GraphX, on several real-world datasets and a variety of analysis tasks. Our experimental results show orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and drastic reductions in the cost of analytics compared to vertex-centric approaches.     

On Participation Constrained Team Formation

The task assignment on the Internet has been widely applied to many areas, e.g., online labor market, online paper review and social activity organization. In this paper, we are concerned with the task assignment problem related to the online labor market, termed as ClusterHire. We improve the definition of the ClusterHire problem, and propose an efficient and effective algorithm, entitled Influence. In addition, we place a participation constraint on ClusterHire. It constrains the load of each expert in order to keep all members from overworking. For the participation-constrained ClusterHire problem, we devise two algorithms, named ProjectFirst and Era. The former generates a participationconstrained team by adding experts to an initial team, and the latter generates a participation-constrained team by removing the experts with the minimum influence from the universe of experts. The experimental evaluations indicate that 1) Influence performs better than the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of effectiveness and time efficiency; 2) ProjectFirst performs better than Era in terms of time efficiency, yet Era performs better than ProjectFirst in terms of effectiveness.     

Approximate and exact hybrid algorithms for private nearest-neighbor queries with database protection

Mobile devices with global positioning capabilities allow users to retrieve points of interest (POI) in their proximity. To protect user privacy, it is important not to disclose exact user coordinates to un-trusted entities that provide location-based services. Currently, there are two main approaches to protect the location privacy of users: (i) hiding locations inside cloaking regions (CRs) and (ii) encrypting location data using private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Previous work focused on finding good trade-offs between privacy and performance of user protection techniques, but disregarded the important issue of protecting the POI dataset D. For instance, location cloaking requires large-sized CRs, leading to excessive disclosure of POIs (O(|D|) in the worst case). PIR, on the other hand, reduces this bound to \(O(\sqrt{|D|})\), but at the expense of high processing and communication overhead. We propose hybrid, two-step approaches for private location-based queries which provide protection for both the users and the database. In the first step, user locations are generalized to coarse-grained CRs which provide strong privacy. Next, a PIR protocol is applied with respect to the obtained query CR. To protect against excessive disclosure of POI locations, we devise two cryptographic protocols that privately evaluate whether a point is enclosed inside a rectangular region or a convex polygon. We also introduce algorithms to efficiently support PIR on dynamic POI sub-sets. We provide solutions for both approximate and exact NN queries. In the approximate case, our method discloses O(1) POI, orders of magnitude fewer than CR- or PIR-based techniques. For the exact case, we obtain optimal disclosure of a single POI, although with slightly higher computational overhead. Experimental results show that the hybrid approaches are scalable in practice, and outperform the pure-PIR approach in terms of computational and communication overhead.     

Exploiting behavioral user models for point of interest recommendation in smart museums

ABSTRACT

The Internet of Things (IoT) holds the promise to blend real-world and online behaviors in principled ways, yet we are only beginning to understand how to effectively exploit insights from the online realm into effective applications in smart environments. Such smart environments aim to provide an improved, personalized experience based on the trail of user interactions with smart devices, but how does recommendation in smart environments differ from the usual online recommender systems? And can we exploit similarities to truly blend behavior in both realms to address the fundamental cold-start problem? In this article, we experiment with behavioral user models based on interactions with smart devices in a museum, and investigate the personalized recommendation of what to see after visiting an initial set of Point of Interests (POIs), a key problem in personalizing museum visits or tour guides, and focus on a critical one-shot POI recommendation task—where to go next? We have logged users' onsite physical information interactions during visits in an IoT-augmented museum exhibition at scale. Furthermore, we have collected an even larger set of search logs of the online museum collection. Users in both sets are unconnected, for privacy reasons we do not have shared IDs. We study the similarities between users' online digital and onsite physical information interaction behaviors, and build new behavioral user models based on the information interaction behaviors in (i) the physical exhibition space, (ii) the online collection, or (iii) both. Specifically, we propose a deep neural multilayer perceptron (MLP) based on explicitly given users' contextual information, and set-based extracted features using users' physical information interaction behaviors and similar users' digital information interaction behaviors. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed behavioral user modeling approach, using both physical and online user information interaction behaviors, improves the onsite POI recommendation baselines' performances on all evaluation metrics. Our proposed MLP approach achieves 83% precision at rank 1 on the critical one-shot POI recommendation problem, realizing the high accuracy needed for fruitful deployment in practical situations. Furthermore, the MLP model is less sensitive to amount of real-world interactions in terms of the seen POIs set-size, by backing of to the online data, hence helps address the cold start problem in recommendation. Our general conclusion is that it is possible to fruitfully combine information interactions in the online and physical world for effective recommendation in smart environments.     

Supervised classification of spam emails with natural language stylometry

Email spam is one of the biggest threats to today’s Internet. To deal with this threat, there are long-established measures like supervised anti-spam filters. In this paper, we report the development and evaluation of sentinel—an anti-spam filter based on natural language and stylometry attributes. The performance of the filter is evaluated not only on non-personalized emails (i.e., emails collected randomly) but also on personalized emails (i.e., emails collected from particular individuals). Among the non-personalized datasets are CSDMC2010, SpamAssassin, and LingSpam, while the Enron-Spam collection comprises personalized emails. The proposed filter extracts natural language attributes from email text that are closely related to writer stylometry and generate classifiers using multiple learning algorithms. Experimental outcomes show that classifiers generated by meta-learning algorithms such as adaboostm1 and bagging are the best, performing equally well and surpassing the performance of a number of filters proposed in previous studies, while a random forest generated classifier is a close second. On the other hand, the performance of classifiers using support vector machine and Naïve Bayes is not satisfactory. In addition, we find much improved results on personalized emails and mixed results on non-personalized emails.     

融合社交关系和局部地理因素的兴趣点推荐

兴趣点（Point-Of-Interest,POI）推荐是基于位置社交网络（Location-Based Social Network,LBSN）中一项重要的个性化服务,可以帮助用户发现其感兴趣的[POI],提高信息服务质量。针对[POI]推荐中存在的数据稀疏性问题,提出一种融合社交关系和局部地理因素的[POI]推荐算法。根据社交关系中用户间的共同签到和距离关系度量用户相似性,并基于用户的协同过滤方法构建社交影响模型。为每个用户划分一个局部活动区域,通过对区域内[POIs]间的签到相关性分析,建立局部地理因素影响模型。基于加权矩阵分解挖掘用户自身偏好,并融合社交关系和局部地理因素进行[POI]推荐。实验表明,所提出的[POI]推荐算法相比其他方法具有更高的准确率和召回率,能够有效缓解数据稀疏性问题,提高推荐质量。