Evaluating the Similarity Estimator Component of the TWIN Personality-based Recommender System

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow the extraction of the personality type from text (following the Big Five model popular in the psychological research). We estimate the possibility of constructing the personality-based Recommender System that does not require users to fill in personality questionnaires. We are applying the proposed system in the online travelling domain to perform TripAdvisor hotels recommendation by analysing the text of user generated reviews, which are freely accessible from the community website

TWIN: Personality-based Intelligent Recommender System

This paper presents the Tell me What I Need (TWIN) Personality-based Intelligent Recommender System, the goal of which is to recommend items chosen by like-minded (or twin ) people with similar personality types which we estimate from their writings. In order to produce recommendations it applies the results achieved in the personality from the text recognition research field to Personality-based Recommender System user profile modelling. In this way it creates a bridge between the efforts of automatic personality score estimation from plain text and the field of Intelligent Recommender Systems. The paper describes the TWIN system architecture, and results of the experimentation with the system in the online travelling domain in order to investigate the possibility of providing valuable recommendations of hotels of the TripAdvisor website for like-minded people . The results compare favourably with related experiments, although they demonstrate the complexity of this challenging task.The research work of the third author is partially funded by the WIQ-EI (IRSES grant n. 269180) and DIANA APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01), and done in the framework of the VLC/Campus Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Roshchina, A.; Cardiff, J.; Rosso, P. (2015). TWIN: Personality-based Intelligent Recommender System. Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. 28(5):2059-2071. https://doi.org/10.3233/IFS-141484S20592071285Bodapati, A. V. (2008). Recommendation Systems with Purchase Data. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(1), 77-93. doi:10.1509/jmkr.45.1.77Dean, J., & Ghemawat, S. (2008). MapReduce. Communications of the ACM, 51(1), 107. doi:10.1145/1327452.1327492Nageswara Rao, K. (2008). Application Domain and Functional Classification of Recommender Systems—A Survey. DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, 28(3), 17-35. doi:10.14429/djlit.28.3.174Castro, J., Rodriguez, R. M., & Barranco, M. J. (2013). Weighting of Features in Content-Based Filtering with Entropy and Dependence Measures. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, 7(1), 80-89. doi:10.1080/18756891.2013.859861Cantador, I., Bellogín, A., & Vallet, D. (2010). Content-based recommendation in social tagging systems. Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Recommender systems - RecSys ’10. doi:10.1145/1864708.1864756Huang, S. (2011). Designing utility-based recommender systems for e-commerce: Evaluation of preference-elicitation methods. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 10(4), 398-407. doi:10.1016/j.elerap.2010.11.003Tkalčič, M., Burnik, U., & Košir, A. (2010). Using affective parameters in a content-based recommender system for images. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 20(4), 279-311. doi:10.1007/s11257-010-9079-zRentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2003). The do re mi’s of everyday life: The structure and personality correlates of music preferences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(6), 1236-1256. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.6.1236Elahi, M., Braunhofer, M., Ricci, F., & Tkalcic, M. (2013). Personality-Based Active Learning for Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 360-371. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-03524-6_31Tkalcic, M., Odic, A., Kosir, A., & Tasic, J. (2013). Affective Labeling in a Content-Based Recommender System for Images. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 15(2), 391-400. doi:10.1109/tmm.2012.2229970Quercia, D., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Crowcroft, J. (2011). Our Twitter Profiles, Our Selves: Predicting Personality with Twitter. 2011 IEEE Third Int’l Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk and Trust and 2011 IEEE Third Int’l Conference on Social Computing. doi:10.1109/passat/socialcom.2011.26Mairesse, F., Walker, M. A., Mehl, M. R., & Moore, R. K. (2007). Using Linguistic Cues for the Automatic Recognition of Personality in Conversation and Text. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 30, 457-500. doi:10.1613/jair.2349Golbeck, J., Robles, C., & Turner, K. (2011). Predicting personality with social media. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA ’11. doi:10.1145/1979742.1979614Hall, M., Frank, E., Holmes, G., Pfahringer, B., Reutemann, P., & Witten, I. H. (2009). The WEKA data mining software. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 11(1), 10. doi:10.1145/1656274.1656278Tausczik, Y. R., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2009). The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(1), 24-54. doi:10.1177/0261927x09351676Islam, M. J., Wu, Q. M. J., Ahmadi, M., & Sid-Ahmed, M. A. (2007). Investigating the Performance of Naive- Bayes Classifiers and K- Nearest Neighbor Classifiers. 2007 International Conference on Convergence Information Technology (ICCIT 2007). doi:10.1109/iccit.2007.14

Human and Artificial Intelligence

Although tremendous advances have been made in recent years, many real-world problems still cannot be solved by machines alone. Hence, the integration between Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence is needed. However, several challenges make this integration complex. The aim of this Special Issue was to provide a large and varied collection of high-level contributions presenting novel approaches and solutions to address the above issues. This Special Issue contains 14 papers (13 research papers and 1 review paper) that deal with various topics related to human–machine interactions and cooperation. Most of these works concern different aspects of recommender systems, which are among the most widespread decision support systems. The domains covered range from healthcare to movies and from biometrics to cultural heritage. However, there are also contributions on vocal assistants and smart interactive technologies. In summary, each paper included in this Special Issue represents a step towards a future with human–machine interactions and cooperation. We hope the readers enjoy reading these articles and may find inspiration for their research activities

Facial expression recognition in the wild : from individual to group

The progress in computing technology has increased the demand for smart systems capable of understanding human affect and emotional manifestations. One of the crucial factors in designing systems equipped with such intelligence is to have accurate automatic Facial Expression Recognition (FER) methods. In computer vision, automatic facial expression analysis is an active field of research for over two decades now. However, there are still a lot of questions unanswered. The research presented in this thesis attempts to address some of the key issues of FER in challenging conditions mentioned as follows: 1) creating a facial expressions database representing real-world conditions; 2) devising Head Pose Normalisation (HPN) methods which are independent of facial parts location; 3) creating automatic methods for the analysis of mood of group of people. The central hypothesis of the thesis is that extracting close to real-world data from movies and performing facial expression analysis on movies is a stepping stone in the direction of moving the analysis of faces towards real-world, unconstrained condition. A temporal facial expressions database, Acted Facial Expressions in the Wild (AFEW) is proposed. The database is constructed and labelled using a semi-automatic process based on closed caption subtitle based keyword search. Currently, AFEW is the largest facial expressions database representing challenging conditions available to the research community. For providing a common platform to researchers in order to evaluate and extend their state-of-the-art FER methods, the first Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) challenge based on AFEW is proposed. An image-only based facial expressions database Static Facial Expressions In The Wild (SFEW) extracted from AFEW is proposed. Furthermore, the thesis focuses on HPN for real-world images. Earlier methods were based on fiducial points. However, as fiducial points detection is an open problem for real-world images, HPN can be error-prone. A HPN method based on response maps generated from part-detectors is proposed. The proposed shape-constrained method does not require fiducial points and head pose information, which makes it suitable for real-world images. Data from movies and the internet, representing real-world conditions poses another major challenge of the presence of multiple subjects to the research community. This defines another focus of this thesis where a novel approach for modeling the perception of mood of a group of people in an image is presented. A new database is constructed from Flickr based on keywords related to social events. Three models are proposed: averaging based Group Expression Model (GEM), Weighted Group Expression Model (GEM_w) and Augmented Group Expression Model (GEM_LDA). GEM_w is based on social contextual attributes, which are used as weights on each person's contribution towards the overall group's mood. Further, GEM_LDA is based on topic model and feature augmentation. The proposed framework is applied to applications of group candid shot selection and event summarisation. The application of Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index metric is explored for finding similar facial expressions. The proposed framework is applied to the problem of creating image albums based on facial expressions, finding corresponding expressions for training facial performance transfer algorithms

Fairness in Information Access Systems

Recommendation, information retrieval, and other information access systems pose unique challenges for investigating and applying the fairness and non-discrimination concepts that have been developed for studying other machine learning systems. While fair information access shares many commonalities with fair classification, the multistakeholder nature of information access applications, the rank-based problem setting, the centrality of personalization in many cases, and the role of user response complicate the problem of identifying precisely what types and operationalizations of fairness may be relevant, let alone measuring or promoting them. In this monograph, we present a taxonomy of the various dimensions of fair information access and survey the literature to date on this new and rapidly-growing topic. We preface this with brief introductions to information access and algorithmic fairness, to facilitate use of this work by scholars with experience in one (or neither) of these fields who wish to learn about their intersection. We conclude with several open problems in fair information access, along with some suggestions for how to approach research in this space

Towards Time-Aware Context-Aware Deep Trust Prediction in Online Social Networks

Trust can be defined as a measure to determine which source of information is reliable and with whom we should share or from whom we should accept information. There are several applications for trust in Online Social Networks (OSNs), including social spammer detection, fake news detection, retweet behaviour detection and recommender systems. Trust prediction is the process of predicting a new trust relation between two users who are not currently connected. In applications of trust, trust relations among users need to be predicted. This process faces many challenges, such as the sparsity of user-specified trust relations, the context-awareness of trust and changes in trust values over time. In this dissertation, we analyse the state-of-the-art in pair-wise trust prediction models in OSNs. We discuss three main challenges in this domain and present novel trust prediction approaches to address them. We first focus on proposing a low-rank representation of users that incorporates users' personality traits as additional information. Then, we propose a set of context-aware trust prediction models. Finally, by considering the time-dependency of trust relations, we propose a dynamic deep trust prediction approach. We design and implement five pair-wise trust prediction approaches and evaluate them with real-world datasets collected from OSNs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other state-of-the-art pair-wise trust prediction models.Comment: 158 pages, 20 figures, and 19 tables. This is my PhD thesis in Macquarie University, Sydney, Australi

Recent Advances in Social Data and Artificial Intelligence 2019

The importance and usefulness of subjects and topics involving social data and artificial intelligence are becoming widely recognized. This book contains invited review, expository, and original research articles dealing with, and presenting state-of-the-art accounts pf, the recent advances in the subjects of social data and artificial intelligence, and potentially their links to Cyberspace

Social analytics for health integration, intelligence, and monitoring

Nowadays, patient-generated social health data are abundant and Healthcare is changing from the authoritative provider-centric model to collaborative and patient-oriented care. The aim of this dissertation is to provide a Social Health Analytics framework to utilize social data to solve the interdisciplinary research challenges of Big Data Science and Health Informatics. Specific research issues and objectives are described below. The first objective is semantic integration of heterogeneous health data sources, which can vary from structured to unstructured and include patient-generated social data as well as authoritative data. An information seeker has to spend time selecting information from many websites and integrating it into a coherent mental model. An integrated health data model is designed to allow accommodating data features from different sources. The model utilizes semantic linked data for lightweight integration and allows a set of analytics and inferences over data sources. A prototype analytical and reasoning tool called “Social InfoButtons” that can be linked from existing EHR systems is developed to allow doctors to understand and take into consideration the behaviors, patterns or trends of patients’ healthcare practices during a patient’s care. The tool can also shed insights for public health officials to make better-informed policy decisions. The second objective is near-real time monitoring of disease outbreaks using social media. The research for epidemics detection based on search query terms entered by millions of users is limited by the fact that query terms are not easily accessible by non-affiliated researchers. Publically available Twitter data is exploited to develop the Epidemics Outbreak and Spread Detection System (EOSDS). EOSDS provides four visual analytics tools for monitoring epidemics, i.e., Instance Map, Distribution Map, Filter Map, and Sentiment Trend to investigate public health threats in space and time. The third objective is to capture, analyze and quantify public health concerns through sentiment classifications on Twitter data. For traditional public health surveillance systems, it is hard to detect and monitor health related concerns and changes in public attitudes to health-related issues, due to their expenses and significant time delays. A two-step sentiment classification model is built to measure the concern. In the first step, Personal tweets are distinguished from Non-Personal tweets. In the second step, Personal Negative tweets are further separated from Personal Non-Negative tweets. In the proposed classification, training data is labeled by an emotion-oriented, clue-based method, and three Machine Learning models are trained and tested. Measure of Concern (MOC) is computed based on the number of Personal Negative sentiment tweets. A timeline trend of the MOC is also generated to monitor public concern levels, which is important for health emergency resource allocations and policy making. The fourth objective is predicting medical condition incidence and progression trajectories by using patients’ self-reported data on PatientsLikeMe. Some medical conditions are correlated with each other to a measureable degree (“comorbidities”). A prediction model is provided to predict the comorbidities and rank future conditions by their likelihood and to predict the possible progression trajectories given an observed medical condition. The novel models for trajectory prediction of medical conditions are validated to cover the comorbidities reported in the medical literature