1,788 research outputs found
A Bibliometric Study on Learning Analytics
Learning analytics tools and techniques are continually developed and published in scholarly discourse. This study aims at examining the intellectual structure of the Learning Analytics domain by collecting and analyzing empirical articles on Learning Analytics for the period of 2004-2018. First, bibliometric analysis and citation analyses of 2730 documents from Scopus identified the top authors, key research affiliations, leading publication sources (journals and conferences), and research themes of the learning analytics domain. Second, Domain Analysis (DA) techniques were used to investigate the intellectual structures of learning analytics research, publication, organization, and communication (Hjørland & Bourdieu 2014). The software of VOSviewer is used to analyze the relationship by publication: historical and institutional; author and institutional relationships and the dissemination of Learning Analytics knowledge. The results of this study showed that Learning Analytics had captured the attention of the global community. The United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom are among the leading countries contributing to the dissemination of learning analytics knowledge. The leading publication sources are ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, and Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The intellectual structures of the learning analytics domain are presented in this study the LA research taxonomy can be re-used by teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders to support the teaching and learning environments in a higher education institution
Inferring Social Media Users’ Demographics from Profile Pictures: A Face++ Analysis on Twitter Users
In this research, we evaluate the applicability of using facial recognition of social media account profile pictures to infer the demographic attributes of gender, race, and age of the account owners leveraging a commercial and well-known image service, specifically Face++. Our goal is to determine the feasibility of this approach for actual system implementation. Using a dataset of approximately 10,000 Twitter profile pictures, we use Face++ to classify this set of images for gender, race, and age. We determine that about 30% of these profile pictures contain identifiable images of people using the current state-of-the-art automated means. We then employ human evaluations to manually tag both the set of images that were determined to contain faces and the set that was determined not to contain faces, comparing the results to Face++. Of the thirty percent that Face++ identified as containing a face, about 80% are more likely than not the account holder based on our manual classification, with a variety of issues in the remaining 20%. Of the images that Face++ was unable to detect a face, we isolate a variety of likely issues preventing this detection, when a face actually appeared in the image. Overall, we find the applicability of automatic facial recognition to infer demographics for system development to be problematic, despite the reported high accuracy achieved for image test collection
Finding Influencers in Complex Networks: An Effective Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Maximizing influences in complex networks is a practically important but
computationally challenging task for social network analysis, due to its NP-
hard nature. Most current approximation or heuristic methods either require
tremendous human design efforts or achieve unsatisfying balances between
effectiveness and efficiency. Recent machine learning attempts only focus on
speed but lack performance enhancement. In this paper, different from previous
attempts, we propose an effective deep reinforcement learning model that
achieves superior performances over traditional best influence maximization
algorithms. Specifically, we design an end-to-end learning framework that
combines graph neural network as the encoder and reinforcement learning as the
decoder, named DREIM. Trough extensive training on small synthetic graphs,
DREIM outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on very large synthetic
and real-world networks on solution quality, and we also empirically show its
linear scalability with regard to the network size, which demonstrates its
superiority in solving this problem
Graph Exploration Matters: Improving both individual-level and system-level diversity in WeChat Feed Recommender
There are roughly three stages in real industrial recommendation systems,
candidates generation (retrieval), ranking and reranking. Individual-level
diversity and system-level diversity are both important for industrial
recommender systems. The former focus on each single user's experience, while
the latter focus on the difference among users. Graph-based retrieval
strategies are inevitably hijacked by heavy users and popular items, leading to
the convergence of candidates for users and the lack of system-level diversity.
Meanwhile, in the reranking phase, Determinantal Point Process (DPP) is
deployed to increase individual-level diverisity. Heavily relying on the
semantic information of items, DPP suffers from clickbait and inaccurate
attributes. Besides, most studies only focus on one of the two levels of
diversity, and ignore the mutual influence among different stages in real
recommender systems. We argue that individual-level diversity and system-level
diversity should be viewed as an integrated problem, and we provide an
efficient and deployable solution for web-scale recommenders. Generally, we
propose to employ the retrieval graph information in diversity-based reranking,
by which to weaken the hidden similarity of items exposed to users, and
consequently gain more graph explorations to improve the system-level
diveristy. Besides, we argue that users' propensity for diversity changes over
time in content feed recommendation. Therefore, with the explored graph, we
also propose to capture the user's real-time personalized propensity to the
diversity. We implement and deploy the combined system in WeChat App's Top
Stories used by hundreds of millions of users. Offline simulations and online
A/B tests show our solution can effectively improve both user engagement and
system revenue
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