AccuSyn is an interactive browser that visualizes conserved synteny relations (similar features) in genomes, giving biologists insights into the evolutionary history and functional relationships between genes. Even simple organisms have huge numbers of genomic features, and raw synteny plots present a daunting clutter of connections of which to make sense. Using a mixed initiative approach, AccuSyn integrates simulated annealing, a well-known metaheuristic for optimization problems, with human interventions to offer non-experts a way to automate decluttering, eliminating a tedious manual bottleneck in the discovery of syntenic information.

The proliferation of personalized recommendation technologies has raised concerns about discrepancies in their recommendation performance across different genders, age groups, and racial or ethnic populations. This varying degree of performance could impact users' trust in the system and may pose legal and ethical issues in domains where fairness and equity are critical concerns, like job recommendation. In this paper, we investigate several potential factors that could be associated with discriminatory performance of a recommendation algorithm for women versus men. We specifically study several characteristics of user profiles and analyze their possible associations with disparate behavior of the system towards different genders. These characteristics include the anomaly in rating behavior, the entropy of users' profiles, and the users' profile size.

Due to popularity in texting and messaging, a recent advancement of deep learning technologies, a conversation-based interaction becomes an emerging user interface. While today's conversation platforms offer basic conversation capabilities such as natural language understanding, entity extraction and simple dialogue management, there are still challenges in developing practical applications to support complex use cases using a dialogue system. In this paper, we highlight such challenges and share practical knowledge learned from our experiences on developing a leisure travel shopping application that combines a personalized recommendation system and a conversation system. Such efforts include a conversation design, extraction of user intents, communication of variables between a dialogue system and analytics engines, and dynamic user interface designs. In particular, we introduce our approach to overcome the unique challenges, understanding user's intent, when dialogue system met personalized recommendation system. Furthermore, we propose a semantic mapping as a novel method to utilize undefined user's preferences when producing recommended items. Finally, examples of recommendations based on natural language conversations are provided in order to exhibit how components in the overall architecture are seamlessly orchestrated. In general, our framework provides guiding principles and best practices on the implementation of task-oriented dialogue system connected with other components in the overall architecture.

Recommender systems face several challenges, e.g., recommending novel and diverse items and generating helpful explanations. Where algorithms struggle, people may excel. We therefore designed CrowdLens to explore different workflows for incorporating people into the recommendation process. We did an online experiment, finding that: compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm, crowdsourcing workflows produced more diverse and novel recommendations favored by human judges;some crowdworkers produced high-quality explanations for their recommendations, and we created an accurate model for identifying high-quality explanations;volunteers from an online community generally performed better than paid crowdworkers, but appropriate algorithmic support erased this gap. We conclude by reflecting on lessons of our work for those considering a crowdsourcing approach and identifying several fundamental issues for future work.

One goal of online social recommendation systems is to harness the wisdom of crowds in order to identify high quality content. Yet the sequential voting mechanisms that are commonly used by these systems are at odds with existing theoretical and empirical literature on optimal aggregation. This literature suggests that sequential voting will promote herding---the tendency for individuals to copy the decisions of others around them---and hence lead to suboptimal content recommendation. Is there a problem with our practice, or a problem with our theory? Previous attempts at answering this question have been limited by a lack of objective measurements of content quality.

We propose a novel technique to predict a user's movie genre preference from her psycholinguistic attributes obtained from user social media interactions. In particular, we build machine learning based classification models that take user tweets as input to derive her psychological attributes: personality and value scores, and gives her movie genre preference as output. We train these models using user tweets in Twitter, and her reviews and ratings of movies of different genres in Internet movie database (IMDb). We exploit a key concept of psychology, i.e., an individual's personality and values may influence her choice in performing different actions in real life. We have investigated how personality and values independently and collectively influence a user preference on different movie genres. Our proposed model can be used for recommending movies to social media users.

Users of online dating sites compete for attention from potential matches. Member profiles provide an opportunity for candidates to present information about themselves that their counterparts use to assess compatibility and desirability. In this paper, we explore how text-based similarities among users of a dating site impact their success in attracting attention. The principle of homophily predicts that to be successful, a user should be perceived as similar to the person they would prefer to date. Conversely, theories of distinctiveness suggest that standing out from the crowd should be beneficial. Using profiles, we explore how the text similarity between a user, the opposite-sex member they are targeting, and their same-sex competitors impacts the likelihood that a sender of a message receives a response conditional on initiating contact. We find that the probability of receiving a response is maximized when the user has high text similarity to the person they message, but low text similarity to the competitors that are also seeking the same individual's attention. This suggests a balance between homophily and distinctiveness theory.

Product reviews provide insights in to real user experiences which can benefit others when making their purchasing decisions. Text-mining and NLP may be used to extract features and content that could influence a new user. Additionally, recommender systems and filtering interfaces rely on manufacturer reported data in order to support user preferences. In many instances this data may be absent or inaccurate. In this paper we focus on age related features mentioned in user reviews of baby and child related products in order to recommend the appropriate age range of a product. We demonstrate that manufacturer related information is frequently absent and when manufacturer specifications are available, we find they may not reflect real user experiences which could assist a buyer in their decision making process. As a result, we present a simple user interface to allow users assess the age appropriateness of the product.

Dating and romantic relationships not only play a huge role in our personal lives but also collectively influence and shape society. Today, many romantic partnerships originate from the Internet, signifying the importance of technology and the web in modern dating. In this paper, we present a text-based computational approach for estimating the relationship compatibility of two users on social media. Unlike many previous works that propose reciprocal recommender systems for online dating websites, we devise a distant supervision heuristic to obtain real world couples from social platforms such as Twitter. Our approach, the CoupleNet is an end-to-end deep learning basedestimator that analyzes the social profiles of two users and subsequently performs a similarity match between the users. Intuitively, our approach performs both user profiling and match-making within a unified end-to-end framework. CoupleNet utilizes hierarchical recurrent neural models for learning representations of user profiles and subsequently coupled attention mechanisms to fuse information aggregated from two users.To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first data-driven deep learning approach for our novel relationship recommendation problem.

Welcome to experience a mind-blowing "Artificial Intelligence Expert Course" in 2022. Artificial Intelligence Expert Course: Platinum Edition - The course has now launched. Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be a unique technology of making a machine, a robot fully autonomous. AI is an analysis of how the machine is thinking, studying, determining, and functioning when it is trying to solve problems. These kinds of problems are present in all fields, the most emerging ones, and even beyond.