Representation learning on heterogeneous spatiotemporal networks

“The problem of learning latent representations of heterogeneous networks with spatial and temporal attributes has been gaining traction in recent years, given its myriad of real-world applications. Most systems with applications in the field of transportation, urban economics, medical information, online e-commerce, etc., handle big data that can be structured into Spatiotemporal Heterogeneous Networks (SHNs), thereby making efficient analysis of these networks extremely vital. In recent years, representation learning models have proven to be quite efficient in capturing effective lower-dimensional representations of data. But, capturing efficient representations of SHNs continues to pose a challenge for the following reasons: (i) Spatiotemporal data that is structured as SHN encapsulate complex spatial and temporal relationships that exist among real-world objects, rendering traditional feature engineering approaches inefficient and compute-intensive; (ii) Due to the unique nature of the SHNs, existing representation learning techniques cannot be directly adopted to capture their representations. To address the problem of learning representations of SHNs, four novel frameworks that focus on their unique spatial and temporal characteristics are introduced: (i) collective representation learning, which focuses on quantifying the importance of each latent feature using Laplacian scores; (ii) modality aware representation learning, which learns from the complex user mobility pattern; (iii) distributed representation learning, which focuses on learning human mobility patterns by leveraging Natural Language Processing algorithms; and (iv) representation learning with node sense disambiguation, which learns contrastive senses of nodes in SHNs. The developed frameworks can help us capture higher-order spatial and temporal interactions of real-world SHNs. Through data-driven simulations, machine learning and deep learning models trained on the representations learned from the developed frameworks are proven to be much more efficient and effective”--Abstract, page iii

How machine learning informs ride-hailing services: A survey

In recent years, online ride-hailing services have emerged as an important component of urban transportation system, which not only provide significant ease for residents’ travel activities, but also shape new travel behavior and diversify urban mobility patterns. This study provides a thorough review of machine-learning-based methodologies for on-demand ride-hailing services. The importance of on-demand ride-hailing services in the spatio-temporal dynamics of urban traffic is first highlighted, with machine-learning-based macro-level ride-hailing research demonstrating its value in guiding the design, planning, operation, and control of urban intelligent transportation systems. Then, the research on travel behavior from the perspective of individual mobility patterns, including carpooling behavior and modal choice behavior, is summarized. In addition, existing studies on order matching and vehicle dispatching strategies, which are among the most important components of on-line ride-hailing systems, are collected and summarized. Finally, some of the critical challenges and opportunities in ride-hailing services are discussed

Exploration de la dynamique humaine basée sur des données massives de réseaux sociaux de géolocalisation : analyse et applications

Human dynamics is an essential aspect of human centric computing. As a transdisciplinary research field, it focuses on understanding the underlying patterns, relationships, and changes of human behavior. By exploring human dynamics, we can understand not only individual’s behavior, such as a presence at a specific place, but also collective behaviors, such as social movement. Understanding human dynamics can thus enable various applications, such as personalized location based services. However, before the availability of ubiquitous smart devices (e.g., smartphones), it is practically hard to collect large-scale human behavior data. With the ubiquity of GPS-equipped smart phones, location based social media has gained increasing popularity in recent years, making large-scale user activity data become attainable. Via location based social media, users can share their activities as real-time presences at Points of Interests (POIs), such as a restaurant or a bar, within their social circles. Such data brings an unprecedented opportunity to study human dynamics. In this dissertation, based on large-scale location centric social media data, we study human dynamics from both individual and collective perspectives. From individual perspective, we study user preference on POIs with different granularities and its applications in personalized location based services, as well as the spatial-temporal regularity of user activities. From collective perspective, we explore the global scale collective activity patterns with both country and city granularities, and also identify their correlations with diverse human culturesLa dynamique humaine est un sujet essentiel de l'informatique centrée sur l’homme. Elle se concentre sur la compréhension des régularités sous-jacentes, des relations, et des changements dans les comportements humains. En analysant la dynamique humaine, nous pouvons comprendre non seulement des comportements individuels, tels que la présence d’une personne à un endroit précis, mais aussi des comportements collectifs, comme les mouvements sociaux. L’exploration de la dynamique humaine permet ainsi diverses applications, entre autres celles des services géo-dépendants personnalisés dans des scénarios de ville intelligente. Avec l'omniprésence des smartphones équipés de GPS, les réseaux sociaux de géolocalisation ont acquis une popularité croissante au cours des dernières années, ce qui rend les données de comportements des utilisateurs disponibles à grande échelle. Sur les dits réseaux sociaux de géolocalisation, les utilisateurs peuvent partager leurs activités en temps réel avec par l'enregistrement de leur présence à des points d'intérêt (POIs), tels qu’un restaurant. Ces données d'activité contiennent des informations massives sur la dynamique humaine. Dans cette thèse, nous explorons la dynamique humaine basée sur les données massives des réseaux sociaux de géolocalisation. Concrètement, du point de vue individuel, nous étudions la préférence de l'utilisateur quant aux POIs avec des granularités différentes et ses applications, ainsi que la régularité spatio-temporelle des activités des utilisateurs. Du point de vue collectif, nous explorons la forme d'activité collective avec les granularités de pays et ville, ainsi qu’en corrélation avec les cultures globale

Recommender Systems for Online and Mobile Social Networks: A survey

Recommender Systems (RS) currently represent a fundamental tool in online services, especially with the advent of Online Social Networks (OSN). In this case, users generate huge amounts of contents and they can be quickly overloaded by useless information. At the same time, social media represent an important source of information to characterize contents and users' interests. RS can exploit this information to further personalize suggestions and improve the recommendation process. In this paper we present a survey of Recommender Systems designed and implemented for Online and Mobile Social Networks, highlighting how the use of social context information improves the recommendation task, and how standard algorithms must be enhanced and optimized to run in a fully distributed environment, as opportunistic networks. We describe advantages and drawbacks of these systems in terms of algorithms, target domains, evaluation metrics and performance evaluations. Eventually, we present some open research challenges in this area

Matching algorithms : fundamentals, applications and challenges

Matching plays a vital role in the rational allocation of resources in many areas, ranging from market operation to people's daily lives. In economics, the term matching theory is coined for pairing two agents in a specific market to reach a stable or optimal state. In computer science, all branches of matching problems have emerged, such as the question-answer matching in information retrieval, user-item matching in a recommender system, and entity-relation matching in the knowledge graph. A preference list is the core element during a matching process, which can either be obtained directly from the agents or generated indirectly by prediction. Based on the preference list access, matching problems are divided into two categories, i.e., explicit matching and implicit matching. In this paper, we first introduce the matching theory's basic models and algorithms in explicit matching. The existing methods for coping with various matching problems in implicit matching are reviewed, such as retrieval matching, user-item matching, entity-relation matching, and image matching. Furthermore, we look into representative applications in these areas, including marriage and labor markets in explicit matching and several similarity-based matching problems in implicit matching. Finally, this survey paper concludes with a discussion of open issues and promising future directions in the field of matching. © 2017 IEEE. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Jing Ren, Xia Feng, Nargiz Sultanova" is provided in this record*

Context-Aware Recommendation Systems in Mobile Environments

Nowadays, the huge amount of information available may easily overwhelm users when they need to take a decision that involves choosing among several options. As a solution to this problem, Recommendation Systems (RS) have emerged to offer relevant items to users. The main goal of these systems is to recommend certain items based on user preferences. Unfortunately, traditional recommendation systems do not consider the user’s context as an important dimension to ensure high-quality recommendations. Motivated by the need to incorporate contextual information during the recommendation process, Context-Aware Recommendation Systems (CARS) have emerged. However, these recent recommendation systems are not designed with mobile users in mind, where the context and the movements of the users and items may be important factors to consider when deciding which items should be recommended. Therefore, context-aware recommendation models should be able to effectively and efficiently exploit the dynamic context of the mobile user in order to offer her/him suitable recommendations and keep them up-to-date.The research area of this thesis belongs to the fields of context-aware recommendation systems and mobile computing. We focus on the following scientific problem: how could we facilitate the development of context-aware recommendation systems in mobile environments to provide users with relevant recommendations? This work is motivated by the lack of generic and flexible context-aware recommendation frameworks that consider aspects related to mobile users and mobile computing. In order to solve the identified problem, we pursue the following general goal: the design and implementation of a context-aware recommendation framework for mobile computing environments that facilitates the development of context-aware recommendation applications for mobile users. In the thesis, we contribute to bridge the gap not only between recommendation systems and context-aware computing, but also between CARS and mobile computing.<br /