Diversify and Conquer: Bandits and Diversity for an Enhanced E-commerce Homepage Experience

In the realm of e-commerce, popular platforms utilize widgets to recommend advertisements and products to their users. However, the prevalence of mobile device usage on these platforms introduces a unique challenge due to the limited screen real estate available. Consequently, the positioning of relevant widgets becomes pivotal in capturing and maintaining customer engagement. Given the restricted screen size of mobile devices, widgets placed at the top of the interface are more prominently displayed and thus attract greater user attention. Conversely, widgets positioned further down the page require users to scroll, resulting in reduced visibility and subsequent lower impression rates. Therefore it becomes imperative to place relevant widgets on top. However, selecting relevant widgets to display is a challenging task as the widgets can be heterogeneous, widgets can be introduced or removed at any given time from the platform. In this work, we model the vertical widget reordering as a contextual multi-arm bandit problem with delayed batch feedback. The objective is to rank the vertical widgets in a personalized manner. We present a two-stage ranking framework that combines contextual bandits with a diversity layer to improve the overall ranking. We demonstrate its effectiveness through offline and online A/B results, conducted on proprietary data from Myntra, a major fashion e-commerce platform in India.Comment: Accepted in Proceedings of Fashionxrecys Workshop, 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 202

Fine-Grained Session Recommendations in E-commerce using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Sustaining users' interest and keeping them engaged in the platform is very important for the success of an e-commerce business. A session encompasses different activities of a user between logging into the platform and logging out or making a purchase. User activities in a session can be classified into two groups: Known Intent and Unknown intent. Known intent activity pertains to the session where the intent of a user to browse/purchase a specific product can be easily captured. Whereas in unknown intent activity, the intent of the user is not known. For example, consider the scenario where a user enters the session to casually browse the products over the platform, similar to the window shopping experience in the offline setting. While recommending similar products is essential in the former, accurately understanding the intent and recommending interesting products is essential in the latter setting in order to retain a user. In this work, we focus primarily on the unknown intent setting where our objective is to recommend a sequence of products to a user in a session to sustain their interest, keep them engaged and possibly drive them towards purchase. We formulate this problem in the framework of the Markov Decision Process (MDP), a popular mathematical framework for sequential decision making and solve it using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques. However, training the next product recommendation is difficult in the RL paradigm due to large variance in browse/purchase behavior of the users. Therefore, we break the problem down into predicting various product attributes, where a pattern/trend can be identified and exploited to build accurate models. We show that the DRL agent provides better performance compared to a greedy strategy

The Impact of Organizational Justice on Organizational Performance in View Point of Employee Voice

Employee’s voice has a significant effect on the wellbeing of employees and it is a valuable factor in an organization’s functions. The main intention of current research is to explore the connection of employee voice with organizational justice and its ultimately impact on organizational performance. Banking sector of Lahore (Pakistan) has been considered as target population. 15 bank’s branches were selected randomly for conducting the research. Overall 220 questionnaires were distributed. 190 questionnaires were returned back and used for analysis. Results demonstrated the direct positive influence of organizational justice on employee voice and organizational performance. Moreover, results showed that the employee voice partially mediates the relationship between organizational justice and organizational performance along with its two dimensions (sales growth and profitability). These results will be very helpful in fostering the efforts of HR specialists towards formulating and embedding the employee’s voice mechanism in service sector

The Impact of Organizational Justice on Organizational Performance in View Point of Employee Voice

Employee’s voice has a significant effect on the wellbeing of employees and it is a valuable factor in an organization’s functions. The main intention of current research is to explore the connection of employee voice with organizational justice and its ultimately impact on organizational performance. Banking sector of Lahore (Pakistan) has been considered as target population. 15 bank’s branches were selected randomly for conducting the research. Overall 220 questionnaires were distributed. 190 questionnaires were returned back and used for analysis. Results demonstrated the direct positive influence of organizational justice on employee voice and organizational performance. Moreover, results showed that the employee voice partially mediates the relationship between organizational justice and organizational performance along with its two dimensions (sales growth and profitability). These results will be very helpful in fostering the efforts of HR specialists towards formulating and embedding the employee’s voice mechanism in service sector

The Impact of Organizational Justice on Organizational Performance in View Point of Employee Voice

in an organization’s functions. The main intention of current research is to explore the connection of employee voice with organizational justice and its ultimately impact on organizational performance. Banking sector of Lahore (Pakistan) has been considered as target population. 15 bank’s branches were selected randomly for conducting the research. Overall 220 questionnaires were distributed. 190 questionnaires were returned back and used for analysis. Results demonstrated the direct positive influence of organizational justice on employee voice and organizational performance. Moreover, results showed that the employee voice partially mediates the relationship between organizational justice and organizational performance along with its two dimensions (sales growth and profitability). These results will be very helpful in fostering the efforts of HR specialists towards formulating and embedding the employee’s voice mechanism in service sector

Chitin based polyurethanes using hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene, part III: surface characteristics.

Hydroxy terminated polybutadiene (HTPB)-chitin based polyurethanes (PUs) with controlled hydrophobicity were synthesized using HTPB and toluene diisocyanate (TDI). The prepolymer was extended with different mass ratios of chitin and 1,4-butane diol (BDO). The effect of chitin contents in chain extender (CE) proportions on surface properties was studied and investigated. Incorporation of chitin contents into the final PU showed decrease in contact angle value of water drop, water absorption (%) and swelling behavior. The antibacterial activity of the prepared samples was affected by varying the chitin contents in the chemical composition of the final PU. The results demonstrated that the use of prepared material can be suggested as non-absorbable suture

Ex Vivo Antiplatelet and Thrombolytic Activity of Bioactive Fractions from the New-Fangled Stem Buds of <i>Ficus religiosa</i> L. with Simultaneous GC-MS Examination

Different parts of Ficus religiosa are the common components of various traditional formulations for the treatment of several blood disorders. The new-fangled stem buds’ powder was extracted with 80% ethanol and successively fractionated by chloroform and methanol. Chloroform and methanol fractions of Ficus religiosa (CFFR and MFFR) were tested for antiplatelet, antithrombotic, thrombolytic, and antioxidant activity in ex vivo mode. The MFFR was particularly investigated for GC-MS and toxicity. The antiplatelet activity of the CFFR, MFFR, and standard drug aspirin at 50 μg/mL was 54.32%, 86.61%, and 87.57%, and a significant delay in clot formation was noted. CFFR at different concentrations did not show a significant effect on the delay of clot formation, antiplatelet, and free radical scavenging activity. The most possible marker compounds for antiplatelet and antioxidant activity identified by GC-MS in the MFFR are salicylate derivatives aromatic compounds such as benzeneacetaldehyde (7), phenylmalonic acid (13), and Salicylic acid (14), as well as Benzamides derivatives such as carbobenzyloxy-dl-norvaline (17), 3-acetoxy-2(1H)-pyridone (16), and 3-benzylhexahydropyrrolo [1,2-a] pyrazine-1,4-dione (35). A toxicity study of MFFR did not show any physical indications of toxicity and mortality up to 1500 mg/kg body weight and nontoxic up to 1000 mg/kg, which is promising for the treatment of atherothrombotic diseases