Intelligent Personalized Searching

Search engine is a very useful tool for almost everyone nowadays. People use search engine for the purpose of searching about their personal finance, restaurants, electronic products, and travel information, to name a few. As helpful as search engines are in terms of providing information, they can also manipulate people behaviors because most people trust online information without a doubt. Furthermore, ordinary users usually only pay attention the highest-ranking pages from the search results. Knowing this predictable user behavior, search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo take advantage and use it as a tool for them to generate profit. Search engine providers are enterprise companies with the goal to generate profit, and an easy way for them to do so is by ranking up particular web pages to promote the product or services of their own or their paid customers. The results from search engine could be misleading. The goal of this project is to filter the bias from search results and provide best matches on behalf of users’ interest

Hierarchical Attention Network for Visually-aware Food Recommendation

Food recommender systems play an important role in assisting users to identify the desired food to eat. Deciding what food to eat is a complex and multi-faceted process, which is influenced by many factors such as the ingredients, appearance of the recipe, the user's personal preference on food, and various contexts like what had been eaten in the past meals. In this work, we formulate the food recommendation problem as predicting user preference on recipes based on three key factors that determine a user's choice on food, namely, 1) the user's (and other users') history; 2) the ingredients of a recipe; and 3) the descriptive image of a recipe. To address this challenging problem, we develop a dedicated neural network based solution Hierarchical Attention based Food Recommendation (HAFR) which is capable of: 1) capturing the collaborative filtering effect like what similar users tend to eat; 2) inferring a user's preference at the ingredient level; and 3) learning user preference from the recipe's visual images. To evaluate our proposed method, we construct a large-scale dataset consisting of millions of ratings from AllRecipes.com. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several competing recommender solutions like Factorization Machine and Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking with an average improvement of 12%, offering promising results in predicting user preference for food. Codes and dataset will be released upon acceptance