“Ask Everyone?” Understanding How Social Q&A Feedback Quality Influences Consumers\u27 Purchase Intentions

Social question & answer (Q&A) feedback is a novel form of electronic word-of-mouth that allows customers to ask questions and share opinions with peer customers. Based on the stimulus-organism-response framework, this paper proposes a model to describe how social Q&A feedback quality affects consumers\u27 willingness to purchase by influencing their perceived risk, perceived usefulness, and use intention. We focused on the social Q&A feature named Ask Everyone in Taobao and collected 153 valid responses through an online survey. Canonical correlation analysis was used to identify the association between feedback characteristics and feedback quality. Then, PLS-SEM was conducted to test the proposed research model. Results show that feedback quality negatively associated with perceived risk, but had a positive impact on perceived usefulness, use intention, and purchase intention. Findings of this research has both theoretical and practical implications for facilitating social Q&A design in e-commerce platforms

From Hospitality to Hostility: The Impact of Polarity Difference in Managerial Responses on Subsequent Guest Satisfaction

Previous research has identified the effects of location bias in online product marketing and online communication. This study delves into these effects by analyzing sentiment polarity differences in managerial responses. Specifically, it investigates how hosts’ location bias towards local versus non-local guests affects guest satisfaction after booking within the context of P2P accommodation platforms. We collect actual host response data from Airbnb and employ a panel regression model with fixed effects to address our research questions. The empirical findings reveal that if hosts have more positive attitudes towards local guests compared to non-local guests, such location discrimination results in a reduction in ratings posted by subsequent guests. Furthermore, the depth of hosts’ descriptions and the number of listings moderate the impact of the polarity variance in managerial responses based on hosts’ location bias on guest satisfaction. These results carry important managerial implications, suggesting that hosts should actively address and minimize their location bias to enhance their reputation and marketing efforts

CP-EB: Talking Face Generation with Controllable Pose and Eye Blinking Embedding

This paper proposes a talking face generation method named "CP-EB" that takes an audio signal as input and a person image as reference, to synthesize a photo-realistic people talking video with head poses controlled by a short video clip and proper eye blinking embedding. It's noted that not only the head pose but also eye blinking are both important aspects for deep fake detection. The implicit control of poses by video has already achieved by the state-of-art work. According to recent research, eye blinking has weak correlation with input audio which means eye blinks extraction from audio and generation are possible. Hence, we propose a GAN-based architecture to extract eye blink feature from input audio and reference video respectively and employ contrastive training between them, then embed it into the concatenated features of identity and poses to generate talking face images. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate photo-realistic talking face with synchronous lips motions, natural head poses and blinking eyes.Comment: Accepted by the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (IEEE ISPA 2023

Dynamic Rheological Studies of Poly(p-phenyleneterephthalamide) and Carbon Nanotube Blends in Sulfuric Acid

We have studied the dynamic scanning of liquid-crystalline (LC) poly(p-phenyleneterephthalamide) sulfuric acid (PPTA-H2SO4) solution, and its blend with single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), by using a flat plate rotational rheometer. The effects of weight concentration and molecular weight of PPTA, as well as operating temperature, on dynamic viscoelasticity of the PPTA-H2SO4 LC solution system are discussed. The transition from a biphasic system to a single-phase LC occurs in the weight concentration range of SWNTs from 0.1% to 0.2%, in which complex viscosity reaches the maximum at 0.2 wt% and the minimum at 0.1 wt%, respectively, of SWNTs. With increasing SWNT weight concentration, the endothermic peak temperature increases from 73.6 to 79.9 °C. The PPTA/SWNT/H2SO4 solution is in its plateau zone and storage modulus (G′) is a dominant factor within the frequency (ω) range of 0.1–10 rad/s. As ω increases, the G′ rises slightly, in direct proportion to the ω. The loss modulus (G″) does not rise as a function of ω when ω < 1 s−1, then when ω > 1 s−1 G″ increases faster than G′, yet not in any proportion to the ω

Exploring Boarding Strategies for High-Speed Railway

In light of the increasing demand for passenger transportation on high-speed railway (HSR), the pedestrian flow at HSR stations has become quite crowded in many countries, which has attracted researchers to study the HSR boarding behavior. In this paper, we propose three boarding strategies based on the features of the boarding behavior at an origin HSR station; we then use a cellular automaton (CA) model to study the impacts of boarding strategies on each passenger’s motion during the boarding process at HSR station. The simulation results indicate that some of the three strategies can optimize some passengers’ boarding time and relieve the congestion degree, and the positive impacts on the boarding process are the most prominent when the three strategies are used simultaneously. The results can help administrators to effectively organize the boarding process at the origin HSR station

Uncovering Insurance Fraud Conspiracy with Network Learning

Fraudulent claim detection is one of the greatest challenges the insurance industry faces. Alibaba's return-freight insurance, providing return-shipping postage compensations over product return on the e-commerce platform, receives thousands of potentially fraudulent claims every day. Such deliberate abuse of the insurance policy could lead to heavy financial losses. In order to detect and prevent fraudulent insurance claims, we developed a novel data-driven procedure to identify groups of organized fraudsters, one of the major contributions to financial losses, by learning network information. In this paper, we introduce a device-sharing network among claimants, followed by developing an automated solution for fraud detection based on graph learning algorithms, to separate fraudsters from regular customers and uncover groups of organized fraudsters. This solution applied at Alibaba achieves more than 80% precision while covering 44% more suspicious accounts compared with a previously deployed rule-based classifier after human expert investigations. Our approach can easily and effectively generalizes to other types of insurance.Comment: Accepted by SIGIR '19. Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 201

Mitochondrial Membrane Remodeling

Mitochondria are key regulators of many important cellular processes and their dysfunction has been implicated in a large number of human disorders. Importantly, mitochondrial function is tightly linked to their ultrastructure, which possesses an intricate membrane architecture defining specific submitochondrial compartments. In particular, the mitochondrial inner membrane is highly folded into membrane invaginations that are essential for oxidative phosphorylation. Furthermore, mitochondrial membranes are highly dynamic and undergo constant membrane remodeling during mitochondrial fusion and fission. It has remained enigmatic how these membrane curvatures are generated and maintained, and specific factors involved in these processes are largely unknown. This review focuses on the current understanding of the molecular mechanism of mitochondrial membrane architectural organization and factors critical for mitochondrial morphogenesis, as well as their functional link to human diseases.Peer reviewe

Deformation and breakup of single drop in laminar and transitional jet flows

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFB0306701), National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.21676007)，the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (XK1802-1), and Scientific Research and Technology Development Projects of China National Petroleum Corporation (No. 2016B-2605).Peer reviewedPostprin