Existing e-commerce platforms heavily rely on manual annotation for product categorization, which is inefficient and inconsistent. These platforms often employ a hierarchical structure for categorizing products; however, few studies have leveraged this hierarchical information for classification. Furthermore, studies that consider hierarchical information fail to account for similarities and differences across various hierarchical categories. Herein, we introduce a large-scale hierarchical dataset collected from the JD e-commerce platform (www.JD.com), comprising 1,011,450 products with titles and a three-level category structure. By making this dataset openly accessible, we provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners to advance research and applications associated with product categorization. Moreover, we propose a novel hierarchical text classification approach based on the widely used Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), called Hierarchical Fine-tuning BERT (HFT-BERT). HFT-BERT leverages the remarkable text feature extraction capabilities of BERT, achieving prediction performance comparable to those of existing methods on short texts. Notably, our HFT-BERT model demonstrates exceptional performance in categorizing longer short texts, such as books.

This work explores using Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate user preferences into energy optimization constraints for home appliances. We describe a task where natural language user utterances are converted into formal constraints for smart appliances, within the broader context of a renewable energy community (REC) and in the Italian scenario. We evaluate the effectiveness of various LLMs currently available for Italian in translating these preferences resorting to classical zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning settings, using a pilot dataset of Italian user requests paired with corresponding formal constraint representation. Our contributions include establishing a baseline performance for this task, publicly releasing the dataset and code for further research, and providing insights on observed best practices and limitations of LLMs in this particular domain.

For two decades, the formalism of quantum mechanics has been successfully used to describe human decision processes, situations of heuristic reasoning, and the contextuality of concepts and their combinations. The phenomenon of 'categorical perception' has put us on track to find a possible deeper cause of the presence of this quantum structure in human cognition. Thus, we show that in an archetype of human perception consisting of the reconciliation of a bottom up stimulus with a top down cognitive expectation pattern, there arises the typical warping of categorical perception, where groups of stimuli clump together to form quanta, which move away from each other and lead to a discretization of a dimension. The individual concepts, which are these quanta, can be modeled by a quantum prototype theory with the square of the absolute value of a corresponding Schr\"odinger wave function as the fuzzy prototype structure, and the superposition of two such wave functions accounts for the interference pattern that occurs when these concepts are combined. Using a simple quantum measurement model, we analyze this archetype of human perception, provide an overview of the experimental evidence base for categorical perception with the phenomenon of warping leading to quantization, and illustrate our analyses with two examples worked out in detail.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a well-known single-channel blind source separation problem that aims to decompose the household energy consumption into itemised energy usage of individual appliances. In this way, considerable energy savings could be achieved by enhancing household's awareness of energy usage. Recent investigations have shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) based approaches are promising for the NILM task. Nevertheless, they normally ignore the inherent properties of appliance operations in the network design, potentially leading to implausible results. We are thus motivated to develop the dual Deep Neural Networks (dual-DNN), which aims to i) take advantage of DNNs' learning capability of latent features and ii) empower the DNN architecture with identification ability of universal properties. Specifically in the design of dual-DNN, we adopt one subnetwork to measure power ratings of different appliances' operation states, and the other subnetwork to identify the running states of target appliances. The final result is then obtained by multiplying these two network outputs and meanwhile considering the multi-state property of household appliances. To enforce the sparsity property in appliance's state operating, we employ median filtering and hard gating mechanisms to the subnetwork for state identification. Compared with the state-of-the-art NILM methods, our dual-DNN approach demonstrates a 21.67% performance improvement in average on two public benchmark datasets.

Advances in technology have made many household appliances more energy efficient, and even given outdated old ones some energy-saving smarts, but addressing the power usage of each individual device across the home is still a tall order. Researchers at Cornell University have been working on more of a one-size-fits-all solution, developing a vibration-sensing device that can keep tabs on appliance usage through machine learning and lasers. The team points to smart homes of the future as its inspiration for developing the VibroSense device, imagining scenarios where the house itself knows when a washing machine has completed its cycle, when a microwave has finished heating food or a faucet is dripping. While replacing each appliance with smart versions or attaching specific sensors to them could be one way to tackle this, the Cornell team sees a more efficient way forward. "In order to have a smart home at this point, you'd need each device to be smart, which is not realistic; or you'd need to install separate sensors on each device or in each area," says Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and senior author of the study.

When you hand over your credit card for a new washing machine or refrigerator, would you pay an extra fee to receive alerts about how well it's working, or if you need to call a service technician? Manufacturers of consumer goods are banking on you saying "yes" to the extra cost, just like enterprises do today for service on hardware investments like jet engines and assembly-line technology. This Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) business model--one which has helped companies in the B2B space generate continuous revenue from their products--is being eyed by consumer companies hungry for income that lasts beyond the initial product purchase. Through "servitization"--combining products with services--businesses can innovate faster and deepen their relationships with customers by providing more value. That value includes data insights derived from IoT-powered devices--from thermostats to wind turbines.

A concrete formal understanding of how concepts combine is vital to significant progress in many fields including psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science. However, concepts have been resistant to mathematical description because people use conjunctions and disjunctions of concepts in ways that violate the rules of classical logic; i.e., concepts interact in ways that are non-compositional [4]. This is true also with respect to properties (e.g., although people do not rate talks as a characteristic property of Pet or Bird, they rate it as characteristic of Pet Bird) and exemplar typicalities (e.g., although people do not rate Guppy as a typical Pet, nor a typical Fish, they rate it as a highly typical Pet Fish [5]). This has come to be known as the Pet Fish Problem, and the general phenomenon wherein the typicality of an exemplar for a conjunctively combined concept is greater than that for either of the constituent concepts has come to be called the Guppy Effect, although further investigation revealed that the Pet Fish Problem is not a particularly good example of the Guppy Effect, and that other concept combinations exhibit this effect more strongly [6]. One can refer to the situation wherein people estimate the typicality of an exemplar of the concept combination as more extreme than it is for one of the constituent concepts in a conjunctive combination as overextension.

Household appliances such as dishwashers, televisions and radios are an indispensable part of the modern household. Yet, people who have some form of physical impairment often find that they are unable to make use of these commonly available appliances, to the detriment of their lifestyle. This paper proposes a gesture interface for home appliances that can be used by people with physical impairments. Two simulated gesture controlled appliances are developed and evaluated by physically impaired people. The results show that this interface is able to allow physically impaired people to make use of modern appliances by gesture.