The short-term reconsumption behaviors, i.e. “reconsume” the near past, account for a large proportion of people’s activities every day and everywhere. In this paper, we firstly derived four generic features which influence people’s short-term reconsumption behaviors. These features were extracted with respect to different roles in the process of reconsumption behaviors, i.e. users, items and interactions. Then, we brought forward two fast algorithms with the linear and the quadratic kernels to predict whether a user will perform a short-term reconsumption at a specific time given the context. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithms are more accurate in the prediction tasks compared with the baselines. Meanwhile, the time complexity of online prediction of our algorithms is O(1), which enables fast prediction in real-world scenarios. The prediction contributes to more intelligent decision-making, e.g. potential revisited customer identification, personalized recommendation, and information re-finding.

School choice programs are implemented to give students/parents an opportunity to choose the public school the students attend. Controlled school choice programs need to provide choices for students/parents while maintaining distributional constraints on the balance on the composition of students, typically in terms of socioeconomic status. Previous works show that setting soft-bounds, which flexibly change the priorities of students based on their types, is more appropriate than setting hard-bounds, which strictly limit the number of accepted students for each type. We consider a case where soft-bounds are imposed and one student can belong to multiple types, e.g., ``financially-distressed'' and ``minority'' types. We first show that when we apply a model that is a straightforward extension of an existing model for disjoint types, there is a chance that no stable matching exists. Thus, we propose an alternative model and an alternative stability definition, where a school has reserved seats for each type. We show that a stable matching is guaranteed to exist in this model, and develop a mechanism called Deferred Acceptance for Overlapping Types (DA-OT). The DA-OT mechanism is strategy-proof and obtains the student-optimal matching within all stable matchings. Computer simulation results illustrate that the DA-OT outperforms an artificial cap mechanism, where the number of seats for each type is fixed.

Motivated by current day crowdsourcing platforms and emergence of online labor markets, this work addresses the problem of task allocation and payment decisions when unreliable and strategic workers arrive over time to work on tasks which must be completed within a deadline. We consider the following scenario: a requester has a set of tasks that must be completed before a deadline; agents (aka crowd workers) arrive over time and it is required to make sequential decisions regarding task allocation and pricing. Agents may have different costs for providing service and these costs are private information of the agents. We assume that agents are not strategic about their arrival times but could be strategic about their costs of service. In addition, agents could be unreliable in the sense of not being able to complete the assigned tasks within the allocated time; these tasks must then be reallocated to other agents to ensure ontime completion of the set of tasks by the deadline. For this setting, we propose two mechanisms: a DPM (DynamicPrice Mechanism) and an ABM (Auction Based Mechanism). Both mechanisms are dominant strategy incentive compatible, budget feasible, and also satisfy ex-post individual rationality for agents who complete the allocated tasks. These mechanisms can be implemented in current day crowdsourcing platforms with minimal changes to the current interaction model.

Predicting cascade dynamics has important implications for understanding information propagation and launching viral marketing. Previous works mainly adopt a pair-wise manner, modeling the propagation probability between pairs of users using n 2 independent parameters for n users. Consequently, these models suffer from severe overfitting problem, especially for pairs of users without direct interactions, limiting their prediction accuracy. Here we propose to model the cascade dynamics by learning two low-dimensional user-specific vectors from observed cascades, capturing their influence and susceptibility respectively. This model requires much less parameters and thus could combat overfitting problem. Moreover, this model could naturally model context-dependent factors like cumulative effect in information propagation. Extensive experiments on synthetic dataset and a large-scale microblogging dataset demonstrate that this model outperforms the existing pair-wise models at predicting cascade dynamics, cascade size, and "who will be retweeted."

Point-of-interest(POI) recommendation becomes a valuable service in location-based social networks. Based on the norm that similar users are likely to have similar preference of POIs, the current recommendation techniques mainly focus on users' preference to provide accurate recommendation results. This tends to generate a list of homogeneous POIs that are clustered into a narrow band of location categories(like food, museum, etc.) in a city. However, users are more interested to taste a wide range of flavors that are exposed in a global set of location categories in the city.In this paper, we formulate a new POI recommendation problem, namely top-K location category based POI recommendation, by introducing information coverage to encode the location categories of POIs in a city.The problem is NP-hard. We develop a greedy algorithm and further optimization to solve this challenging problem. The experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the utility of new POI recommendations and the superior performance of the proposed algorithms.

Information diffusion, which studies how information is propagated in social networks, has attracted considerable research effort recently. However, most existing approaches do not distinguish social roles that nodes may play in the diffusion process. In this paper, we study the interplay between users' social roles and their influence on information diffusion. We propose a Role-Aware INformation diffusion model (RAIN) that integrates social role recognition and diffusion modeling into a unified framework. We develop a Gibbs-sampling based algorithm to learn the proposed model using historical diffusion data. The proposed model can be applied to different scenarios. For instance, at the micro-level, the proposed model can be used to predict whether an individual user will repost a specific message; while at the macro-level, we can use the model to predict the scale and the duration of a diffusion process. We evaluate the proposed model on a real social media data set. Our model performs much better in both micro- and macro-level prediction than several alternative methods.

We study a game with \emph{strategic} vendors (the agents) who own multiple items and a single buyer with a submodular valuation function. The goal of the vendors is to maximize their revenue via pricing of the items, given that the buyer will buy the set of items that maximizes his net payoff.% (valuation minus the prices). We show this game may not always have a pure Nash equilibrium, in contrast to previous results for the special case where each vendor owns a single item. We do so by relating our game to an intermediate, discrete game in which the vendors only choose the available items, and their prices are set exogenously afterwards. We further make use of the intermediate game to provide tight bounds on the price of anarchy for the subset games that have pure Nash equilibria; we find that the optimal PoA reached in the previous special cases does not hold, but only a logarithmic one. Finally, we show that for a special case of submodular functions, efficient pure Nash equilibria always exist.

Learning mutually-grounded vision-language knowledge is a foundational task for cognitive systems and human-level artificial intelligence. Most of knowledge-learning techniques are focused on single modal representations in a static environment with a fixed set of data. Here, we explore an ecologically more-plausible setting by using a stream of cartoon videos to build vision-language concept hierarchies continuously. This approach is motivated by the literature on cognitive development in early childhood. We present the model of deep concept hierarchy (DCH) that enables the progressive abstraction of concept knowledge in multiple levels. We develop a stochastic method for graph construction, i.e. a graph Monte Carlo algorithm, to search efficiently the huge compositional space of the vision-language concepts. The concept hierarchies are built incrementally and can handle concept drift, allowing for being deployed in lifelong learning environments. Using a series of approximately 200 episodes of educational cartoon videos we demonstrate the emergence and evolution of the concept hierarchies as the video stories unfold. We also present the application of the deep concept hierarchies for context-dependent translation between vision and language, i.e. the transcription of a visual scene into text and the generation of visual imagery from text.

User-generated reviews are valuable resources for decision making. Identifying the aspect categories discussed in a given review sentence (e.g., “food” and “service” in restaurant reviews) is an important task of sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Given a predefined aspect category set, most previous researches leverage hand-crafted features and a classification algorithm to accomplish the task. The crucial step to achieve better performance is feature engineering which consumes much human effort and may be unstable when the product domain changes. In this paper, we propose a representation learning approach to automatically learn useful features for aspect category detection. Specifically, a semi-supervised word embedding algorithm is first proposed to obtain continuous word representations on a large set of reviews with noisy labels. Afterwards, we propose to generate deeper and hybrid features through neural networks stacked on the word vectors. A logistic regression classifier is finally trained with the hybrid features to predict the aspect category. The experiments are carried out on a benchmark dataset released by SemEval-2014. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance and outperforms the best participating team as well as a few strong baselines.

Collective social and behavioral information commonly exists in nature. There is a widespread intuitive sense that the characteristics of these social and behavioral information are to some extend related to the themes (or semantics) of the activities or targets. In this paper, we explicitly validate the interplay of collective social behavioral information and group themes using a large scale real dataset of online groups, and demonstrate the possibility of perceiving group themes from collective social and behavioral information. We propose a REgularized miXEd Regression (REXER) model based on matrix factorization to infer hierarchical semantics (including both group category and group labels) from collective social and behavioral information of group members. We extensively evaluate the proposed method in a large scale real online group dataset. For the prediction of group themes, the proposed REXER achieves satisfactory performances in various criterions. More specifically, we can predict the category of a group (among 6 categories) purely based on the collective social and behavioral information of the group with the Precision@1 to be 55.16% , without any assistance from group labels or conversation contents. We also show, perhaps counterintuitively, that the collective social and behavioral information is more reliable than the titles and labels of groups for inferring the group categories.