Detection of Review Abuse via Semi-Supervised Binary Multi-Target Tensor Decomposition

Product reviews and ratings on e-commerce websites provide customers with detailed insights about various aspects of the product such as quality, usefulness, etc. Since they influence customers' buying decisions, product reviews have become a fertile ground for abuse by sellers (colluding with reviewers) to promote their own products or to tarnish the reputation of competitor's products. In this paper, our focus is on detecting such abusive entities (both sellers and reviewers) by applying tensor decomposition on the product reviews data. While tensor decomposition is mostly unsupervised, we formulate our problem as a semi-supervised binary multi-target tensor decomposition, to take advantage of currently known abusive entities. We empirically show that our multi-target semi-supervised model achieves higher precision and recall in detecting abusive entities as compared to unsupervised techniques. Finally, we show that our proposed stochastic partial natural gradient inference for our model empirically achieves faster convergence than stochastic gradient and Online-EM with sufficient statistics.Comment: Accepted to the 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2019. Contains supplementary material. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1804.0383

Microbiology of Central Amazon lakes

Heterotrophic parameters of a black water lake (Lago Tupé) and four different Várzea lakes of the Janauacá region (L. Castanho, L. Muru-Murú, L. Jacaré and L. Jutaí Grande) were studied during high and low water phases. Besides heterotrophic planktonic bacterial populations, saprobic bacterial populations, chlorophyll-a content, and dissolved organic carbon concentration were determined because of their possible relationship to chemoorganotrophy. Saprobic bacterial numbers of black water lake (L. Tupé) ranged from 2.7 to 1.3 x 10^4/l and a maximum uptake velocity (Vmax) ranged from 0.09 - 9.3 pg glucose/l/h. Várzea lakes receive water from Rio Solimões have higher bacterial numbers. The saprobic bacterial varied between 4 x 10^3 - 2.2x 10^5 during high water phase and 1.1 - 9 x 10^5/l during low water phase. The maximum velocity of uptake (Vmax) for the Vârzea lakes varied between 0.039 and 0.662 pg glucose/l/h during high water phase and 1.36 - 2.944 pg glucose/h during low water phase. Comparison of kinetic data from several lakes suggests a relationship between the bacterial uptake rate of glucose and phytoplankton production. Both saprobic bacterial numbers and activity in L. Tupé may be close to the minimum recorded in the freshwater environment. In the Várzea lakes studied, the relationship between Vmax and phytoplankton biomass was quite evident (r = 0.963). The total bacterial populations of Várzea lakes were very high and ranged from 2.1 - 11.6 x 10^8/l during high water phase and 4,2 - 15.6 x 10^9/l during low water phase. The dynamics of the bacteria in the Amazon lakes is characterized by high bacterial numbers, large seasonal fluctuations, and very slow turnover times (Tt) for the available organic matter. There is a good evidence that water level fluctuations is a very important ecological parameter which regulates the microbiological productivity of aquatic ecosystem in the Central Amazon lakes. Such observations were also made earlier on the primary production of algae (SCHMIDT 1973) and on the production of floating meadows (JUNK 1970)

Pathways Across the Valley of Death: Novel Intellectual Property Strategies for Accelerated Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is stagnating. Government agencies, industry analysts, and industry scientists have all noted that, despite significant increases in pharmaceutical R&D funding, the production of fundamentally new drugs - particularly drugs that work on new biological pathways and proteins - remains disappointingly low. To some extent, pharmaceutical firms are already embracing the prescription of new, more collaborative R&D organizational models suggested by industry analysts. In this Article, we build on collaborative strategies that firms are already employing by proposing a novel public-private collaboration that would help move upstream academic research across the valley of death that separates upstream research from downstream drug candidates. By exchanging trade secrecy for contract-based collaboration, our proposal would both protect intellectual property rights and enable many more researchers to search for potential drug candidates

Analysis of the B→K2∗(→Kπ)l+l−B \to K^*_{2} (\to K \pi) l^+ l^- decay

In this paper we study the angular distribution of the rare B decay $B \to K^*_2 (\to K \pi) l^+ l^-$, which is expected to be observed soon. We use the standard effective Hamiltonian approach, and use the form factors that have already been estimated for the corresponding radiative decay $B \to K^*_2 \gamma$. The additional form factors that come into play for the dileptonic channel are estimated using the large energy effective theory (LEET), which enables one to relate the additional form factors to the form factors for the radiative mode. Our results provide, just like in the case of the $K^*(892)$ resonance, an opportunity for a straightforward comparison of the basic theory with experimental results which may be expected in the near future for this channel.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures; as accepted for Phys. Rev.

Migration as a risk and a livelihood strategy: HIV across the life course of migrant families in India

Migrant workers are understood to be vulnerable to HIV. However, little is known about the experience of migration-based households following HIV infection. This qualitative study examined the migration-HIV relationship beyond the point of infection, looking at how it affects livelihood choices, household relationships and the economic viability of migrant families. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 HIV-positive migrant men and women recruited from an anti-retroviral therapy (ART) centre in north India. Following infection among the migrant men, contact with free, public-sector HIV services was often made late, after the development of debilitating symptoms, abandonment of migrant work and return to native villages. After enrolment at the ART centre participants’ health eventually stabilised but they now faced serious economic debt, an inflexible treatment regimen and reduced physical strength. Insecure migrant job markets, monthly drug collection and discriminatory employment policies impeded future migration plans. HIV-positive wives of migrants occupied an insecure position in the rural marital household that depended on their husbands’ health and presence of children. The migration-HIV relationship continued to shape the life course of migrant families beyond the point of infection, often exposing them again to the economic insecurity that migration had helped to overcome, threatening their long-term survival

Ethnomedicinal Plant Resources of Mizoram, India: Implication of Traditional Knowledge in Health Care System

Socially, folk medicines, mainly based on plants, enjoy a respectable position today, especially in the developing countries, where modern health service is limited. Safe, effective and inexpensive indigenous remedies are gaining popularity among the people of both urban and rural society of India. A floristic survey of ethnomedicinal plants occurring in the tribal area of Mizoram was conducted over the period of last five years to assess the potentiality of plant resources for modern treatments. The information provided in this paper on medicinal uses of plants is based on the exhaustive interviews with local physicians practising indigenous system of medicine, village headmen, priests and various tribal folks/groups of Mizoram. In this paper, 159 ethnomedicianl plant species belonging to 134 genera and 56 families recorded from tropical forests, home gardens, roadsides and University Campus of Mizoram have been described. A categorical list of plant species along with their local name, scientific name, distribution status, habit, plant part/s used and the mode of administration reported for effective control of different diseases linked with humans