Deep Collaborative Filtering Approaches for Context-Aware Venue Recommendation

In recent years, vast amounts of user-generated data have being created on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Yelp and Foursquare. Making effective personalised venue suggestions to users based on their preferences and surrounding context is a challenging task. Context-Aware Venue Recommendation (CAVR) is an emerging topic that has gained a lot of attention from researchers, where context can be the user's current location for example. Matrix Factorisation (MF) is one of the most popular collaborative filtering-based techniques, which can be used to predict a user's rating on venues by exploiting explicit feedback (e.g. users' ratings on venues). However, such explicit feedback may not be available, particularly for inactive users, while implicit feedback is easier to obtain from LBSNs as it does not require the users to explicitly express their satisfaction with the venues. In addition, the MF-based approaches usually suffer from the sparsity problem where users/venues have very few rating, hindering the prediction accuracy. Although previous works on user-venue rating prediction have proposed to alleviate the sparsity problem by leveraging user-generated data such as social information from LBSNs, research that investigates the usefulness of Deep Neural Network algorithms (DNN) in alleviating the sparsity problem for CAVR remains untouched or partially studied

Effect of cataract surgery on cognitive function in elderly: Results of Fujiwara-kyo Eye Study

<div><p>Purpose</p><p>To determine whether there is a significant association between prior cataract surgery and cognitive function in an elderly Japanese cohort.</p><p>Setting</p><p>Nara Medical University, Nara, Japan.</p><p>Design</p><p>The Fujiwara-kyo Eye Study was a cross-sectional epidemiological study.</p><p>Methods</p><p>The subjects were ≥ 68-years who lived in the Nara Prefecture and responded to recruitment notices. All of the subjects received comprehensive ophthalmological examinations, and answered questionnaires on their socio-demographic and medical history including prior cataract surgery. The association between prior cataract surgery and cognitive function was determined.</p><p>Results</p><p>A total of the 2764 subjects whose mean age was 76.3±4.8 years (±standard deviation) was studied. Of these, 668 individuals (24.2%) had undergone cataract surgery. Of these, 150 (5.4%) had dementia as determined by the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score ≤23, and 877 individuals (31.7%) had mild cognitive impairment (MCI; MMSE score 24–26). The subjects who had prior cataract surgery had significantly lower odds ratio (OR) of having MCI (OR = 0.78, 95% confidence interval; CI 0.64–0.96, <i>P</i> = 0.019) than those who had not had cataract surgery after adjusting for age, sex, body mass index, education, hypertension, diabetes, depression, and history of stroke. The OR was still lower when the visual acuity was also added to the adjusted factors (OR 0.79, 95% CI 0.64–0.97, <i>P</i> = 0.025). However, prior cataract surgery did not contribute significantly to the low OR for dementia.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>Cataract surgery may play a role in reducing the risk of developing MCI independently of visual acuity but not for dementia.</p></div

Relationship between pigment epithelium-derived factor and renal function

Correlation between pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF) levels and blood urea nitrogen shows a correlation coefficient of r=0.54 at a significance level of p<p><b>Copyright information:</b></p><p>Taken from "Relationship between pigment epithelium-derived factor (PEDF) and renal function in patients with diabetic retinopathy"</p><p></p><p>Molecular Vision 2008;14():992-996.</p><p>Published online 28 May 2008</p><p>PMCID:PMC2405814.</p><p></p

Basic and clinical characteristics of 2764 participants by cognitive status.

<p>Basic and clinical characteristics of 2764 participants by cognitive status.</p

Associations between visual acuity and cognitive impairment by cataract status.

<p>Associations between visual acuity and cognitive impairment by cataract status.</p

Odds ratio for association between cataract surgery and cognitive status.

<p>Odds ratio for association between cataract surgery and cognitive status.</p

Rate of change in subfoveal choroidal thickness (CT).

<p>A: Changes of the subfoveal CT of amblyopic eyes in patients with anisohypermetropic amblyopia. The thicker choroids became thinner and thinner choroids became thicker. There was a negative correlation between the rate of change in the subfoveal choroidal thickness and the baseline subfoveal choroidal thickness. (<i>r</i> = -0.59, <i>P</i> = 0.003; Pearson’s correlation coefficient). B: Changes of the subfoveal CT of the fellow eyes in patients with anisohypermetropic amblyopia. The thicker choroid became thinner and thinner choroid became thicker. There was a negative correlation between the rate of change in the subfoveal choroidal thickness and the baseline subfoveal choroidal thickness. (<i>r</i> = -0.48, <i>P</i> = 0.02; Pearson’s correlation coefficient). C: Changes of the subfoveal CT of control eyes. There was no correlation between the rate of change in the subfoveal choroidal thickness and the baseline subfoveal choroidal thickness. (<i>r</i> = -0.15, <i>P</i> = 0.49; Pearson’s correlation coefficient).</p

Demographics of amblyopic patients and controls at the baseline.

<p>Demographics of amblyopic patients and controls at the baseline.</p

The correlation between VWF antigen and parameters (BCVA, CRT, and CCT) at baseline.

In each graph, the horizontal axis presents the VWF antigen (%). BCVA, best-corrected visual acuity (LogMAR unit); CRT, central retinal thickness; CCT, central choroidal thickness; RVO, retinal vein occlusion.</p

The correlation between VWF antigen and the CCT of fellow eyes at baseline.

CCT, central choroidal thickness; RVO, retinal vein occlusion.</p