The Effect Of Online Customer Reviews On Customer\u27s Perceived Risk Associated With Online Leisure Hotel Booking

As online shopping is widely used in the hospitality industry, research in this field constantly strives to understand the customer behavior in online purchasing activities. Online customer reviews (OCRs) and perceived risk have been extensively evaluated in previous studies in related with online purchasing. In spite of the large body of work on the topic of OCRs effect on consumer behavior, it is still unclear that how OCRs affect the decision process of the consumers when they make online booking. Due to the intangibility of hospitality or tourism product and the nature of online booking, risk perception is considered as one of the most important factors that impact the buyer\u27s decision. Thus, it is constructive to investigate the effect of OCRs in the context of consumer perceived risk associated with online shopping, in the hope of understanding how OCRs affect the decision process and seeking solutions for the hotel marketers to improve their service as well as the online commenting system. In this study, we demonstrated a method which investigates the relationship between consumers\u27 perceived risk associated with online leisure hotel shopping and different types of OCRs (core and peripheral). By evaluating perceived risk associated with online leisure hotel booking caused by different hotel attributes, we addressed the importance of OCRs on various hotel attributes and therefore provided information for E-marketers to fine-tune their E-business strategies in terms of managing proper online customer reviews. Two hundred surveys were distributed. The instrument contained two parts and one scenario: (1) Demographic information, past experience, and attitudes towards OCRs of the participants regarding online leisure hotel booking. (2) A scenario was given that the participant was planning a trip for his/herself the up-coming vocation. (3) Operational statements were used to evaluate each individual participant\u27s risk perception about his/her most recent online leisure hotel booking experience. The findings provided exploratory insights about the dimensions of perceived risk identified in the process of online leisure hotel booking, effect of the positive and negative reviews, different OCRs had different implications for different hotel preferences and the magnitudes of OCRs effect for each dimension of perceived risk associated with online leisure hotel booking. Detailed findings were discussed in Chapter 5

Boosting Efficiency in Task-Agnostic Exploration through Causal Knowledge

The effectiveness of model training heavily relies on the quality of available training resources. However, budget constraints often impose limitations on data collection efforts. To tackle this challenge, we introduce causal exploration in this paper, a strategy that leverages the underlying causal knowledge for both data collection and model training. We, in particular, focus on enhancing the sample efficiency and reliability of the world model learning within the domain of task-agnostic reinforcement learning. During the exploration phase, the agent actively selects actions expected to yield causal insights most beneficial for world model training. Concurrently, the causal knowledge is acquired and incrementally refined with the ongoing collection of data. We demonstrate that causal exploration aids in learning accurate world models using fewer data and provide theoretical guarantees for its convergence. Empirical experiments, on both synthetic data and real-world applications, further validate the benefits of causal exploration.Comment: This paper was accepted by IJCAI'2

Spatial Variations of Dust Opacity and Grain Growth in Dark Clouds: L1689, L1709 and L1712

The far-infrared (FIR) opacity of dust in dark clouds within the Ophiuchus molecular cloud is investigated through multi-wavelength infrared observations from UKIDSS, Spitzer and Herschel. Employing the infrared color excess technique with both near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared (MIR) photometric data, a high-resolution extinction map in the $K$ band ($A_K$) is constructed for three dark clouds: L1689, L1709, and L1712. The derived extinction map has a resolution of $1'$ and reaches a depth of $A_K\sim3$ mag. The FIR optical depths $\tau_{250}$ at a reference wavelength of $250\,\rm \mu m$ are obtained by fitting the Herschel PACS and SPIRE continuum data at 100, 160, 250, 350 and 500 $\rm \mu m$ using a modified blackbody model. The average dust opacity per unit gas mass at $250\rm \mu m$, $r\kappa_{250}$ is determined through a pixel-by-pixel correlation of $\tau_{250}$ with $A_K$, yielding a value of approximately $0.09\,\rm cm^2\,g^{-1}$, which is about 2-3 times higher than the typical value in the diffuse interstellar medium (ISM). Additionally, an independent analysis across 16 sub-regions within the Ophiuchus cloud indicates spatial variations in dust opacity, with values ranging from 0.07-0.12$\,\rm cm^2\,g^{-1}$. Although the observed trend of increasing dust opacity with higher extinction implies grain growth, our findings indicate that rapid grain growth clearly not yet occurred in the dark clouds studied in this work.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ (16 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables

Enhancing ASIC Technology Mapping via Parallel Supergate Computing

With the development of large-scale integrated circuits, electronic design automation~(EDA) tools are increasingly emphasizing efficiency, with parallel algorithms becoming a trend. The optimization of delay reduction is a crucial factor for ASIC technology mapping, and supergate technology proves to be an effective method for achieving this in EDA tools flow. However, we have observed that increasing the number of generated supergates can reduce delay, but this comes at the cost of an exponential increase in computation time. In this paper, we propose a parallel supergate computing method that addresses the tradeoff between time-consuming and delay optimization. The proposed method utilizes the input-constrained supergate pattern to parallelly generate the supergate candidates, and then filter the valid supergates as the results. Experiment results show the efficiency of the proposed method, for example, it can attain the improvement of 4x speedup in computation time and 10.1 in delay reduction with 32 threads

The impact of tertiary lymphoid structure on the efficacy of postoperative adjuvant transcatheter arterial chemoembolization in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

ObjectiveTo explore the impact of tertiary lymphoid structure (TLS) on the efficacy of adjuvant transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) following curative resection in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). MethodsA retrospective study enrolled 200 patients receiving adjuvant TACE and 145 non-TACE controls who underwent curative resection for HCC at the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University from January 2011 to December 2015. Tumor tissue sections were evaluated for TLS through hematoxylin-eosin (HE) staining. Two hundred patients receiving TACE treatment were divided into the TLS positive group and the TLS negative group. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to reduce confounding factors. Kaplan-Meier survival curves, log-rank tests and Cox proportional hazards model were employed to assess the impact of TLS on prognosis of patients receiving postoperative adjuvant TACE. ResultsBefore PSM, the TLS positive group (n＝101) had significantly longer early recurrence-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) compared to TLS negative group (n＝99, P＜0.001). After PSM, there were 69 cases in both the TLS positive and TLS negative groups, with no statistically significant differences in baseline data between the two groups. The TLS positive group still showed significantly longer early RFS (P＜0.001) and OS (P＝0.002). The results of the Cox proportional hazards model indicated that the presence of TLS in tumor tissue was an independent protective factor for early RFS (HR＝0.240, P＜0.001) and OS (HR＝0.282, P＜0.001) in patients undergoing postoperative adjuvant TACE treatment. Subgroup analysis of 345 patients showed that among patients with TLS present in tumor tissue, those receiving adjuvant TACE had longer early RFS (P＝0.034) and OS (P＝0.018) compared to those who did not receive adjuvant TACE, while the efficacy of adjuvant TACE was not significant in patients without TLS. ConclusionsTLS is an important indicator affecting the efficacy of postoperative adjuvant TACE and patient prognosis

Parallel AIG Refactoring via Conflict Breaking

Algorithm parallelization to leverage multi-core platforms for improving the efficiency of Electronic Design Automation~(EDA) tools plays a significant role in enhancing the scalability of Integrated Circuit (IC) designs. Logic optimization is a key process in the EDA design flow to reduce the area and depth of the circuit graph by finding logically equivalent graphs for substitution, which is typically time-consuming. To address these challenges, in this paper, we first analyze two types of conflicts that need to be handled in the parallelization framework of refactoring And-Inverter Graph~(AIG). We then present a fine-grained parallel AIG refactoring method, which strikes a balance between the degree of parallelism and the conflicts encountered during the refactoring operations. Experiment results show that our parallel refactor is 28x averagely faster than the sequential algorithm on large benchmark tests with 64 physical CPU cores, and has comparable optimization quality