One size does not fit all: the differential impact of online reviews

There has been plenty of research on the impact of online reviews on product sales in the last decade. However, prior studies don’t always reach the same conclusions. Literature review indicates that, because of data limitations, prior studies treat the consumers as homogeneous and ignore their individual characteristics. There has only been very limited research that delves into the characteristics of the products being reviewed. Do online reviews have the same impact on consumers who may have different shopping habits or demographic characteristics? Do online reviews also impact the sales of all products/services to the same extent? Using a unique dataset that includes individually identifiable consumer online review browsing data and purchase data, this paper analyzes the effect of online reviews from a more nuanced perspective by examining how individual consumer shopping characteristics and vendor characteristics moderate the effect of online reviews as well as vendors’ marketing activities

An Empirical Analysis of Usability-Sociability Design for Sustaining Virtual Communities

This study aims to explore how the usability and sociability design of virtual communities could encourage members’ continuous participant in the communities. A theoretical model is proposed to explain the effects of usability and sociability design on continuous participation through members’ perceived usefulness, enjoyment and sense of belonging. Data is collected from members of five popular leisure oriented virtual communities in China. The results show that both perceived usefulness and enjoyment have impacts on members’ continuous participation intention. Among the usability and sociability design factors, we find that personalized service is the most critical mechanism that encourages members to continuously participate in virtual communities, while community infrastructure, friend connection and event organization also have positive effects on members’ continuous participation intention through individual motivations. However, it is surprised to find out that leaders’ involvement has no influence on members’ continuous participation intention. Both theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed

The Role of IS Capabilities in the Development of Multi-Sided Platforms: The Digital Ecosystem Strategy of Alibaba.com

Multi-sided platforms (MSP) are revolutionizing the global competitive landscape in the new networked economy. Yet, although these MSPs are underpinned by information systems (IS), there is currently little research on how the IS capabilities of the platform sponsor can influence, and co-evolve with, the development of the platform over time. The lack of knowledge in this area may account for the difficulties faced by a significant number of platform sponsors in developing their MSPs effectively. Using a case study of Alibaba.com, one of the world’s largest and most commercially successful online MSP, we inductively derive a process theory of MSP development from an IS capability perspective to address this knowledge gap. The process model reveals that the role of IS capabilities in MSP development is evolutionary in nature, and the antecedent IS capabilities, nature, and outcomes of MSP development can be dramatically different in the various stages of development

Learning a Complete Image Indexing Pipeline

To work at scale, a complete image indexing system comprises two components: An inverted file index to restrict the actual search to only a subset that should contain most of the items relevant to the query; An approximate distance computation mechanism to rapidly scan these lists. While supervised deep learning has recently enabled improvements to the latter, the former continues to be based on unsupervised clustering in the literature. In this work, we propose a first system that learns both components within a unifying neural framework of structured binary encoding

Asymmetric cryorolling for fabrication of nanostructural aluminum sheets

Nanostructural Al 1050 sheets were produced using a novel method of asymmetric cryorolling under ratios of upper and down rolling velocities (RUDV) of 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Sheets were rolled to about 0.17 mm from 1.5 mm. Both the strength and ductility of Al 1050 sheets increase with RUDVs. Tensile strength of Al sheets with the RUDV 1.4 is larger 22.3% of that for RUDV 1.1, which is 196 MPa. The TEM observations show the grain size is 360 nm when the RUDV is 1.1, and 211 nm for RUDV 1.4

UAE: Universal Anatomical Embedding on Multi-modality Medical Images

Identifying specific anatomical structures (\textit{e.g.}, lesions or landmarks) in medical images plays a fundamental role in medical image analysis. Exemplar-based landmark detection methods are receiving increasing attention since they can detect arbitrary anatomical points in inference while do not need landmark annotations in training. They use self-supervised learning to acquire a discriminative embedding for each voxel within the image. These approaches can identify corresponding landmarks through nearest neighbor matching and has demonstrated promising results across various tasks. However, current methods still face challenges in: (1) differentiating voxels with similar appearance but different semantic meanings (\textit{e.g.}, two adjacent structures without clear borders); (2) matching voxels with similar semantics but markedly different appearance (\textit{e.g.}, the same vessel before and after contrast injection); and (3) cross-modality matching (\textit{e.g.}, CT-MRI landmark-based registration). To overcome these challenges, we propose universal anatomical embedding (UAE), which is a unified framework designed to learn appearance, semantic, and cross-modality anatomical embeddings. Specifically, UAE incorporates three key innovations: (1) semantic embedding learning with prototypical contrastive loss; (2) a fixed-point-based matching strategy; and (3) an iterative approach for cross-modality embedding learning. We thoroughly evaluated UAE across intra- and inter-modality tasks, including one-shot landmark detection, lesion tracking on longitudinal CT scans, and CT-MRI affine/rigid registration with varying field of view. Our results suggest that UAE outperforms state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and versatile approach for landmark based medical image analysis tasks. Code and trained models are available at: \href{https://shorturl.at/bgsB3

Anatomy-Aware Lymph Node Detection in Chest CT using Implicit Station Stratification

Finding abnormal lymph nodes in radiological images is highly important for various medical tasks such as cancer metastasis staging and radiotherapy planning. Lymph nodes (LNs) are small glands scattered throughout the body. They are grouped or defined to various LN stations according to their anatomical locations. The CT imaging appearance and context of LNs in different stations vary significantly, posing challenges for automated detection, especially for pathological LNs. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel end-to-end framework to improve LN detection performance by leveraging their station information. We design a multi-head detector and make each head focus on differentiating the LN and non-LN structures of certain stations. Pseudo station labels are generated by an LN station classifier as a form of multi-task learning during training, so we do not need another explicit LN station prediction model during inference. Our algorithm is evaluated on 82 patients with lung cancer and 91 patients with esophageal cancer. The proposed implicit station stratification method improves the detection sensitivity of thoracic lymph nodes from 65.1% to 71.4% and from 80.3% to 85.5% at 2 false positives per patient on the two datasets, respectively, which significantly outperforms various existing state-of-the-art baseline techniques such as nnUNet, nnDetection and LENS

Phenylhexyl isothiocyanate has dual function as histone deacetylase inhibitor and hypomethylating agent and can inhibit myeloma cell growth by targeting critical pathways

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors are a new class of chemotherapeutic agents. Our laboratory has recently reported that phenylhexyl isothiocyanate (PHI), a synthetic isothiocyanate, is an inhibitor of HDAC. In this study we examined whether PHI is a hypomethylating agent and its effects on myeloma cells. RPMI8226, a myeloma cell line, was treated with PHI. PHI inhibited the proliferation of the myeloma cells and induced apoptosis in a concentration as low as 0.5 μM. Cell proliferation was reduced to 50% of control with PHI concentration of 0.5 μM. Cell cycle analysis revealed that PHI caused G1-phase arrest of RPMI8226 cells. PHI induced p16 hypomethylation in a concentration- dependent manner. PHI was further shown to induce histone H3 hyperacetylation in a concentration-dependent manner. It was also demonstrated that PHI inhibited IL-6 receptor expression and VEGF production in the RPMI8226 cells, and reactivated p21 expression. It was found that PHI induced apoptosis through disruption of mitochondrial membrane potential. For the first time we show that PHI can induce both p16 hypomethylation and histone H3 hyperacetylation. We conclude that PHI has dual epigenetic effects on p16 hypomethylation and histone hyperacetylation in myeloma cells and targets several critical processes of myeloma proliferation