Leveraging Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation problems have received increasing attention in research during the past few years, leading to the inception of a large variety of algorithmic approaches. In this work, we explore how large language models (LLMs), which are nowadays introducing disruptive effects in many AI-based applications, can be used to build or improve sequential recommendation approaches. Specifically, we devise and evaluate three approaches to leverage the power of LLMs in different ways. Our results from experiments on two datasets show that initializing the state-of-the-art sequential recommendation model BERT4Rec with embeddings obtained from an LLM improves NDCG by 15-20% compared to the vanilla BERT4Rec model. Furthermore, we find that a simple approach that leverages LLM embeddings for producing recommendations, can provide competitive performance by highlighting semantically related items. We publicly share the code and data of our experiments to ensure reproducibility.Comment: 9 page

The Carbon Footprint of Conference Papers.

The action required to stem the environmental and social implications of climate change depends crucially on how humankind shapes technology, economy, lifestyle and policy. With transport CO2 emissions accounting for about a quarter of the total, we examine the contribution of CO2 output by scientific travel. Thankfully for the reputation of the scientific community, CO2 emissions associated with the trips required to present a paper at a scientific conference account for just 0.003% of the yearly total. However, with CO2 emissions for a single conference trip amounting to 7% of an average individual's total CO2 emissions, scientists should lead by example by demonstrating leadership in addressing the issue

Conspicuous corruption: Evidence at a country level

People can exhibit their status by the consumption of particular goods or experiential purchases; this is known as “conspicuous consumption”; the practice is widespread and explains the market characteristics of a whole class of goods, Veblen goods, demand for which increase in tandem with their price. The value of such positional goods lies in their distribution among the population—the rarer they are, the more desirable they become. At the same time, higher income, often associated with higher status, has been studied in its relation to unethical behavior. Here we present research that shows how a particular Veblen good, illicit behavior, and wealth, combine to produce the display of illegality as a status symbol. We gathered evidence at a large, country-level, scale of a particular form of consumption of an illictly acquired good for status purposes. We show that in Greece, a developed middle-income country, where authorities cannot issue custom vanity license plates, people acquire distinguishing plate numbers that act as vanity plate surrogates. We found that such license plates are more common in cars with bigger engines and in luxury brands, and are therefore associated with higher value vehicles. This cannot be explained under the lawful procedures for allocating license plates and must therefore be the result of illegal activities, such as graft. This suggests a pattern of “conspicuous corruption”, where individuals break the law and use their gains as status symbols, knowing that the symbols hint at rule-breaking, as long as the unlawful practice cannot be incontestably established.Software Engineerin

Conference travel CO₂ per year.

<p>Conference travel CO₂ per year.</p

PiCO QL: A software library for runtime interactive queries on program data

Pico ql is an open source c/c++ software whose scientific scope is real-time interactive analysis of in-memory data through sql queries. It exposes a relational view of a system’s or application’s data structures, which is queryable through sql. While the application or system is executing, users can input queries through a web-based interface or issue web service requests. Queries execute on the live data structures through the respective relational views. pico ql makes a good candidate for ad-hoc data analysis in applications and for diagnostics in systems settings. Applications of pico ql include the Linux kernel, the Valgrind instrumentation framework, a gis application, a virtual real-time observatory of stellar objects, and a source code analyser. Keywords: sql, Main memory data structures, Data analysis, Program dat

Best Average CO₂ Emissions by Author Country.

<p>Best Average CO₂ Emissions by Author Country.</p

Most Commonly Travelled US State Pairs and those with the Highest CO₂ Emissions.

<p>Most Commonly Travelled US State Pairs and those with the Highest CO₂ Emissions.</p

Conference Travel CO₂ Emissions by Conference Country.

<p>Conference Travel CO₂ Emissions by Conference Country.</p