Identifying informative components in binary data is an essential task in many research areas, including life sciences, social sciences, and recommendation systems. Boolean matrix factorization (BMF) is a family of methods that performs this task by efficiently factorizing the data. In real-world settings, the data is often distributed across stakeholders and required to stay private, prohibiting the straightforward application of BMF. To adapt BMF to this context, we approach the problem from a federated-learning perspective, while building on a state-of-the-art continuous binary matrix factorization relaxation to BMF that enables efficient gradient-based optimization. We propose to only share the relaxed component matrices, which are aggregated centrally using a proximal operator that regularizes for binary outcomes. We show the convergence of our federated proximal gradient descent algorithm and provide differential privacy guarantees. Our extensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that our algorithm outperforms, in terms of quality and efficacy, federation schemes of state-of-the-art BMF methods on a diverse set of real-world and synthetic data.

A quick look at census data (more than 11,000 people turn 65 each day in the U.S.), along with my own rough calculations, suggest that several hundred people are turning 70 each day in the great state of California, and every 10 minutes or so, one or more of them email me about their license renewal adventures with the DMV. I get the usual, always entertaining horror stories about testing: ("They put in ridiculous questions that do not pertain to driving," said 75-year-old Dahana Klerer of Newport Beach, who flunked twice and added, "I'm not a stupid person but they make you feel really stupid.") California is about to be hit by an aging population wave, and Steve Lopez is riding it. His column focuses on the blessings and burdens of advancing age -- and how some folks are challenging the stigma associated with older adults. "I had no problem," said 79-year-old Ruth Gleason of Ridgecrest, who added: "Thank you and Steve Gordon at the DMV for working to alleviate the test-taking fears for over-70 CA drivers."

Recommendation systems and assistants (from now on, recommenders) - algorithms suggesting items or providing solutions based on users' preferences or requests [99, 105, 141, 166] - influence through online platforms most actions of our day to day life. For example, recommendations on social media suggest new social connections, those on online retail platforms guide users' product choices, navigation services offer routes to desired destinations, and generative AI platforms produce content based on users' requests. Unlike other AI tools, such as medical diagnostic support systems, robotic vision systems, or autonomous driving, which assist in specific tasks or functions, recommenders are ubiquitous in online platforms, shaping our decisions and interactions instantly and profoundly. The influence recommenders exert on users' behaviour may generate long-lasting and often unintended effects on human-AI ecosystems [131], such as amplifying political radicalisation processes [82], increasing CO2 emissions in the environment [36] and amplifying inequality, biases and discriminations [120]. The interaction between humans and recommenders has been examined in various fields using different nomenclatures, research methods and datasets, often producing incongruent findings.

Recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences across various web applications by analyzing the complicated relationships between users and items. Knowledge graphs(KGs) have been widely used to enhance the performance of recommender systems. However, KGs are known to be noisy and incomplete, which are hard to provide reliable explanations for recommendation results. An explainable recommender system is crucial for the product development and subsequent decision-making. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel recommender that synergies Large Language Models (LLMs) and KGs to enhance the recommendation and provide interpretable results. Specifically, we first harness the power of LLMs to augment KG reconstruction. LLMs comprehend and decompose user reviews into new triples that are added into KG. In this way, we can enrich KGs with explainable paths that express user preferences. To enhance the recommendation on augmented KGs, we introduce a novel subgraph reasoning module that effectively measures the importance of nodes and discovers reasoning for recommendation. Finally, these reasoning paths are fed into the LLMs to generate interpretable explanations of the recommendation results. Our approach significantly enhances both the effectiveness and interpretability of recommender systems, especially in cross-selling scenarios where traditional methods falter. The effectiveness of our approach has been rigorously tested on four open real-world datasets, with our methods demonstrating a superior performance over contemporary state-of-the-art techniques by an average improvement of 12%. The application of our model in a multinational engineering and technology company cross-selling recommendation system further underscores its practical utility and potential to redefine recommendation practices through improved accuracy and user trust.

Former'Bachelorette' lead Hannah Brown spoke with Fox News Digital ahead of publication day for her first novel, 'Mistakes We Never Made.' Brown shared insight on the storyline, writing process and how her confidence grew in the process. The world of dating is hard to navigate -- even if you're an A-list celebrity. Celebrities have taken a wide range of approaches to finding their person. Many have had high-profile relationships with fellow stars, while others have dated outside the spotlight and have kept their love life a lot more private. Some celebrities have even found success using dating apps.

Smart home assistants are fun and they aren't just for adults. Kids can have just as much--if not more--fun talking to Alexa and doing all sorts of cool stuff around the house. But what if you don't want your kids to have full rein over Alexa's capabilities? That's where the Echo Dot Kids comes into play--and right now the Echo Dot Kids is down to its best price of 28 for Prime members as an early Prime Day deal. More than half off, this awesome deal is just a foretaste of what you can expect in the upcoming Prime Day sale.

Analyzing social media trends can create a win-win situation for both creators and consumers. Creators can receive fair compensation, while consumers gain access to engaging, relevant, and personalized content. This paper proposes a new model for analyzing Bitcoin trends on Twitter by incorporating a 'liquid democracy' approach based on user reputation. This system aims to identify the most impactful trends and their influence on Bitcoin prices and trading volume. It uses a Twitter sentiment analysis model based on a reputation rating system to determine the impact on Bitcoin price change and traded volume. In addition, the reputation model considers the users' higher-order friends on the social network (the initial Twitter input channels in our case study) to improve the accuracy and diversity of the reputation results. We analyze Bitcoin-related news on Twitter to understand how trends and user sentiment, measured through our Liquid Rank Reputation System, affect Bitcoin price fluctuations and trading activity within the studied time frame. This reputation model can also be used as an additional layer in other trend and sentiment analysis models. The paper proposes the implementation, challenges, and future scope of the liquid rank reputation model.

Since the creation of the Web, recommender systems (RSs) have been an indispensable mechanism in information filtering. State-of-the-art RSs primarily depend on categorical features, which ecoded by embedding vectors, resulting in excessively large embedding tables. To prevent over-parameterized embedding tables from harming scalability, both academia and industry have seen increasing efforts in compressing RS embeddings. However, despite the prosperity of lightweight embedding-based RSs (LERSs), a wide diversity is seen in evaluation protocols, resulting in obstacles when relating LERS performance to real-world usability. Moreover, despite the common goal of lightweight embeddings, LERSs are evaluated with a single choice between the two main recommendation tasks -- collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation. This lack of discussions on cross-task transferability hinders the development of unified, more scalable solutions. Motivated by these issues, this study investigates various LERSs' performance, efficiency, and cross-task transferability via a thorough benchmarking process. Additionally, we propose an efficient embedding compression method using magnitude pruning, which is an easy-to-deploy yet highly competitive baseline that outperforms various complex LERSs. Our study reveals the distinct performance of LERSs across the two tasks, shedding light on their effectiveness and generalizability. To support edge-based recommendations, we tested all LERSs on a Raspberry Pi 4, where the efficiency bottleneck is exposed. Finally, we conclude this paper with critical summaries of LERS performance, model selection suggestions, and underexplored challenges around LERSs for future research. To encourage future research, we publish source codes and artifacts at \href{this link}{https://github.com/chenxing1999/recsys-benchmark}.

Data bias, e.g., popularity impairs the dynamics of two-sided markets within recommender systems. This overshadows the less visible but potentially intriguing long-tail items that could capture user interest. Despite the abundance of research surrounding this issue, it still poses challenges and remains a hot topic in academic circles. Along this line, in this paper, we developed a re-ranking approach in dynamic settings with fair-exposure optimization driven by strategic agents. Designed for the producer side, the execution of agents assumes content creators can modify item features based on strategic incentives to maximize their exposure. This iterative process entails an end-to-end optimization, employing differentiable ranking operators that simultaneously target accuracy and fairness. Joint objectives ensure the performance of recommendations while enhancing the visibility of tail items. We also leveraged the performativity nature of predictions to illustrate how strategic learning influences content creators to shift towards fairness efficiently, thereby incentivizing features of tail items. Through comprehensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, we have substantiated the effectiveness and dominance of the proposed method especially on unveiling the potential of tail items.

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