In this paper, we present DiRecGNN, an attention-enhanced entity recommendation framework for monitoring cloud services at Microsoft. We provide insights on the usefulness of this feature as perceived by the cloud service owners and lessons learned from deployment. Specifically, we introduce the problem of recommending the optimal subset of attributes (dimensions) that should be tracked by an automated watchdog (monitor) for cloud services. To begin, we construct the monitor heterogeneous graph at production-scale. The interaction dynamics of these entities are often characterized by limited structural and engagement information, resulting in inferior performance of state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, traditional methods fail to capture the dependencies between entities spanning a long range due to their homophilic nature. Therefore, we propose an attention-enhanced entity ranking model inspired by transformer architectures. Our model utilizes a multi-head attention mechanism to focus on heterogeneous neighbors and their attributes, and further attends to paths sampled using random walks to capture long-range dependencies. We also employ multi-faceted loss functions to optimize for relevant recommendations while respecting the inherent sparsity of the data. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods, with our model achieving a 43.1% increase in MRR. Furthermore, product teams who consumed these features perceive the feature as useful and rated it 4.5 out of 5.

Demographic predictions of population aged 65 and over suggest the need for telemedicine applications in the eldercare domain. Current solutions are mainly focused on fall detection. This paper presents a working prototype of a system that in addition to fall detection monitors a variety of user’s behavior characteristics that help raise awareness of health risks. It monitors the state of user’s health, and more importantly, detects changes in behavior characteristics that potentially indicate a forthcoming or current disease, illness or some other disability. The system utilizes domain knowledge from medical literature on quantitative behavior analysis and combines it with an outlier-detection algorithm in order to identify anomalous behavior. Preliminary results with the working prototype are promising, showing a potential to deploy the system in practice.