A Model of Social Explanations for a Conversational Movie Recommendation System

A critical aspect of any recommendation process is explaining the reasoning behind each recommendation. These explanations can not only improve users' experiences, but also change their perception of the recommendation quality. This work describes our human-centered design for our conversational movie recommendation agent, which explains its decisions as humans would. After exploring and analyzing a corpus of dyadic interactions, we developed a computational model of explanations. We then incorporated this model in the architecture of a conversational agent and evaluated the resulting system via a user experiment. Our results show that social explanations can improve the perceived quality of both the system and the interaction, regardless of the intrinsic quality of the recommendations

Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper's channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61501507), and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. BK20150719). The work of Nan Yang is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150103905)

High capacity multiuser multiantenna communication techniques

One of the main issues involved in the development of future wireless communication systems is the multiple access technique used to efficiently share the available spectrum among users. In rich multipath environment, spatial dimension can be exploited to meet the increasing number of users and their demands without consuming extra bandwidth and power. Therefore, it is utilized in the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to increase the spectral efficiency significantly. However, multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems are still challenging to be widely adopted in next generation standards. In this thesis, new techniques are proposed to increase the channel and user capacity and improve the error performance of MU-MIMO over Rayleigh fading channel environment. For realistic system design and performance evaluation, channel correlation is considered as one of the main channel impurities due its severe influence on capacity and reliability. Two simple methods called generalized successive coloring technique (GSCT) and generalized iterative coloring technique (GICT) are proposed for accurate generation of correlated Rayleigh fading channels (CRFC). They are designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing methods by avoiding factorization of desired covariance matrix of the Gaussian samples. The superiority of these techniques is demonstrated by extensive simulations of different practical system scenarios. To mitigate the effects of channel correlations, a novel constellation constrained MU-MIMO (CC-MU-MIMO) scheme is proposed using transmit signal design and maximum likelihood joint detection (MLJD) at the receiver. It is designed to maximize the channel capacity and error performance based on principles of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance (dmin) of composite received signals. Two signal design methods named as unequal power allocation (UPA) and rotation constellation (RC) are utilized to resolve the detection ambiguity caused by correlation. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of considered scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. Furthermore, significant gain in SNR is achieved particularly in moderate to high correlations which have direct impact to maintain high user capacity. A new efficient receive antenna selection (RAS) technique referred to as phase difference based selection (PDBS) is proposed for single and multiuser MIMO systems to maximize the capacity over CRFC. It utilizes the received signal constellation to select the subset of antennas with highest (dmin) constellations due to its direct impact on the capacity and BER performance. A low complexity algorithm is designed by employing the Euclidean norm of channel matrix rows with their corresponding phase differences. Capacity analysis and simulation results show that PDBS outperforms norm based selection (NBS) and near to optimal selection (OS) for all correlation and SNR values. This technique provides fast RAS to capture most of the gains promised by multiantenna systems over different channel conditions. Finally, novel group layered MU-MIMO (GL-MU-MIMO) scheme is introduced to exploit the available spectrum for higher user capacity with affordable complexity. It takes the advantages of spatial difference among users and power control at base station to increase the number of users beyond the available number of RF chains. It is achieved by dividing the users into two groups according to their received power, high power group (HPG) and low power group (LPG). Different configurations of low complexity group layered multiuser detection (GL-MUD) and group power allocation ratio (η) are utilized to provide a valuable tradeoff between complexity and overall system performance. Furthermore, RAS diversity is incorporated by using NBS and a new selection algorithm called HPG-PDBS to increase the channel capacity and enhance the error performance. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the superiority of proposed scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. By using appropriate value of (η), it shows higher sum rate capacity and substantial increase in the user capacity up to two-fold at target BER and SNR values