Integrating collaborative filtering and search-based techniques for personalized online product recommendation

The existing Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique that has been widely applied by e-commerce sites requires a large amount of ratings data to make meaningful recommendations. It is not directly applicable for recommending products that are not frequently purchased by users, such as cars and houses, as it is difficult to collect rating data for such products from the users. Many of the e-commerce sites for infrequently purchased products are still using basic search-based techniques whereby the products that match with the attributes given in the target user's query are retrieved and recommended to the user. However, search-based recommenders cannot provide personalized recommendations. For different users, the recommendations will be the same if they provide the same query regardless of any difference in their online navigation behaviour. This paper proposes to integrate collaborative filtering and search-based techniques to provide personalized recommendations for infrequently purchased products. Two different techniques are proposed, namely CFRRobin and CFAg Query. Instead of using the target user's query to search for products as normal search based systems do, the CFRRobin technique uses the products in which the target user's neighbours have shown interest as queries to retrieve relevant products, and then recommends to the target user a list of products by merging and ranking the returned products using the Round Robin method. The CFAg Query technique uses the products that the user's neighbours have shown interest in to derive an aggregated query, which is then used to retrieve products to recommend to the target user. Experiments conducted on a real e-commerce dataset show that both the proposed techniques CFRRobin and CFAg Query perform better than the standard Collaborative Filtering (CF) and the Basic Search (BS) approaches, which are widely applied by the current e-commerce applications. The CFRRobin and CFAg Query approaches also outperform the e- isting query expansion (QE) technique that was proposed for recommending infrequently purchased products.

Towards semantic search and inference in electronic medical records : an approach using concept-based information retrieval

For more than a decade research in the field of context aware computing has aimed to find ways to exploit situational information that can be detected by mobile computing and sensor technologies. The goal is to provide people with new and improved applications, enhanced functionality and better use experience (Dey, 2001). Early applications focused on representing or computing on physical parameters, such as showing your location and the location of people or things around you. Such applications might show where the next bus is, which of your friends is in the vicinity and so on. With the advent of social networking software and microblogging sites such as Facebook and Twitter, recommender systems and so on context-aware computing is moving towards mining the social web in order to provide better representations and understanding of context, including social context. In this paper we begin by recapping different theoretical framings of context. We then discuss the problem of context- aware computing from a design perspective.

A fast tabu search algorithm for the group shop scheduling problem

Three types of shop scheduling problems, the flow shop, the job shop and the open shop scheduling problems, have been widely studied in the literature. However, very few articles address the group shop scheduling problem introduced in 1997, which is a general formulation that covers the three above mentioned shop scheduling problems and the mixed shop scheduling problem. In this paper, we apply tabu search to the group shop scheduling problem and evaluate the performance of the algorithm on a set of benchmark problems. The computational results show that our tabu search algorithm is typically more efficient and faster than the other methods proposed in the literature. Furthermore, the proposed tabu search method has found some new best solutions of the benchmark instances.

Non-compositional concepts and quantum tests

Compositionality is a frequently made assumption in linguistics, and yet many human subjects reveal highly non-compositional word associations when confronted with novel concept combinations. This article will show how a non-compositional account of concept combinations can be supplied by modelling them as interacting quantum systems.

In search of the Korean digital wave

This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the 'Korean digital wave' by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide, and Korea's 'compressed modernity' and swift industrialisation. It underscores the importance of interrogating a range of groundbreaking developments and innovations within Korea's digital mediascapes, and its creative and cultural industries, in order to gain a complex understanding of one of Australia's most significant export markets and trading partners. Given the financial and political commitment in Australia to a high-speed broadband network that aims to stimulate economic and cultural activity, recent technological developments in Korea, and the double-edged role played by government policy in shaping the 'Korean digital wave', merit close attention from media and communications scholars.

Towards semantic search and inference in electronic medical records : an approach using concept-based information retrieval

Background This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching. Aim The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records. Method Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology. Results Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision. Conclusion The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.

The quantum inspired modelling of changing attitudes and self-organising societies

We utilise the well-developed quantum decision models known to the QI community to create a higher order social decision making model. A simple Agent Based Model (ABM) of a society of agents with changing attitudes towards a social issue is presented, where the private attitudes of individuals in the system are represented using a geometric structure inspired by quantum theory. We track the changing attitudes of the members of that society, and their resulting propensities to act, or not, in a given social context. A number of new issues surrounding this "scaling up" of quantum decision theories are discussed, as well as new directions and opportunities.

Coupling of energy from quantum emitters to the plasmonic mode of V groove waveguides: A numerical study

This work is a theoretical investigation into the coupling of a single excited quantum emitter to the plasmon mode of a V groove waveguide. The V groove waveguide consists of a triangular channel milled in gold and the emitter is modeled as a dipole emitter, and could represent a quantum dot, nitrogen vacancy in diamond, or similar. In this work the dependence of coupling efficiency of emitter to plasmon mode is determined for various geometrical parameters of the emitter-waveguide system. Using the finite element method, the effect on coupling efficiency of the emitter position and orientation, groove angle, groove depth, and tip radius, is studied in detail. We demonstrate that all parameters, with the exception of groove depth, have a significant impact on the attainable coupling efficiency. Understanding the effect of various geometrical parameters on the coupling between emitters and the plasmonic mode of the waveguide is essential for the design and optimization of quantum dot–V groove devices.

Quantum key distribution in the classical authenticated key exchange framework

Key establishment is a crucial primitive for building secure channels in a multi-party setting. Without quantum mechanics, key establishment can only be done under the assumption that some computational problem is hard. Since digital communication can be easily eavesdropped and recorded, it is important to consider the secrecy of information anticipating future algorithmic and computational discoveries which could break the secrecy of past keys, violating the secrecy of the confidential channel. Quantum key distribution (QKD) can be used generate secret keys that are secure against any future algorithmic or computational improvements. QKD protocols still require authentication of classical communication, although existing security proofs of QKD typically assume idealized authentication. It is generally considered folklore that QKD when used with computationally secure authentication is still secure against an unbounded adversary, provided the adversary did not break the authentication during the run of the protocol. We describe a security model for quantum key distribution extending classical authenticated key exchange (AKE) security models. Using our model, we characterize the long-term security of the BB84 QKD protocol with computationally secure authentication against an eventually unbounded adversary. By basing our model on traditional AKE models, we can more readily compare the relative merits of various forms of QKD and existing classical AKE protocols. This comparison illustrates in which types of adversarial environments different quantum and classical key agreement protocols can be secure.

In search of a youth justice pedagogy? A commentary

Purpose – This paper seeks to look at youth justice (YJ) personnel training and education and the recommendations about it made in Time for a Fresh Start. Design/methodology/approach – The pedagogic tensions that currently shape YJ training are described – particularly those around the question of instructionalism vs education and what “specialist” means in the context of YJ. Findings – The paper suggests that the authors of Time for a Fresh Start missed the opportunity to better serve the public and young people's interests by neither acknowledging the pedagogic tensions nor articulating what a “specialist” “YJ” professional training can mean in twenty-first century England and Wales. Originality/value – The paper highlights an urgent need for an open debate between academics, practitioners and policy makers about YJ pedagogy.

Can you describe him for me? A technique for semantic person search in video

From a law enforcement standpoint, the ability to search for a person matching a semantic description (i.e. 1.8m tall, red shirt, jeans) is highly desirable. While a significant research effort has focused on person re-detection (the task of identifying a previously observed individual in surveillance video), these techniques require descriptors to be built from existing image or video observations. As such, person re-detection techniques are not suited to situations where footage of the person of interest is not readily available, such as a witness reporting a recent crime. In this paper, we present a novel framework that is able to search for a person based on a semantic description. The proposed approach uses size and colour cues, and does not require a person detection routine to locate people in the scene, improving utility in crowded conditions. The proposed approach is demonstrated with a new database that will be made available to the research community, and we show that the proposed technique is able to correctly localise a person in a video based on a simple semantic description.