Zhou Xiao

Xiao Zhou, Danyang Liu, Jianxun Lian et al.

The success of recommender systems in modern online platforms is inseparable from the accurate capture of users' personal tastes. In everyday life, large amounts of user feedback data are created along with user-item online interactions in a variety of ways, such as browsing, purchasing, and sharing. These multiple types of user feedback provide us with tremendous opportunities to detect individuals' fine-grained preferences. Different from most existing recommender systems that rely on a single type of feedback, we advocate incorporating multiple types of user-item interactions for better recommendations. Based on the observation that the underlying spectrum of user preferences is reflected in various types of interactions with items and can be uncovered by latent relational learning in metric space, we propose a unified neural learning framework, named Multi-Relational Memory Network (MRMN). It can not only model fine-grained user-item relations but also enable us to discriminate between feedback types in terms of the strength and diversity of user preferences. Extensive experiments show that the proposed MRMN model outperforms competitive state-of-the-art algorithms in a wide range of scenarios, including e-commerce, local services, and job recommendations.

Xiao Zhou, Anastasios Noulas, Cecilia Mascoloo et al.

Cultural activity is an inherent aspect of urban life and the success of a modern city is largely determined by its capacity to offer generous cultural entertainment to its citizens. To this end, the optimal allocation of cultural establishments and related resources across urban regions becomes of vital importance, as it can reduce financial costs in terms of planning and improve quality of life in the city, more generally. In this paper, we make use of a large longitudinal dataset of user location check-ins from the online social network WeChat to develop a data-driven framework for cultural planning in the city of Beijing. We exploit rich spatio-temporal representations on user activity at cultural venues and use a novel extended version of the traditional latent Dirichlet allocation model that incorporates temporal information to identify latent patterns of urban cultural interactions. Using the characteristic typologies of mobile user cultural activities emitted by the model, we determine the levels of demand for different types of cultural resources across urban areas. We then compare those with the corresponding levels of supply as driven by the presence and spatial reach of cultural venues in local areas to obtain high resolution maps that indicate urban regions with lack of cultural resources, and thus give suggestions for further urban cultural planning and investment optimisation.