Yannis Manolopoulos

George Margaritis, Dionysios Kritsas, Dimitrios Katsaros et al.

ACM and IEEE are the two premier associations on computing and electrical/electronics engineering which publish and organize the great majority of periodicals and conferences, respectively, serving these disciplines. Science is a constantly evolving process, and these publication fora are expected to follow the trends. In this article, we focus on the periodicals published by the two associations and seek to detect and/or confirm any contemporary science trends as these are reflected to the periodical titles established recently. Our study is rather qualitative than quantitative, aiming at revealing patterns immediately comprehensible and validatable by the reader. Among the most notable patterns, we see a growing preference of both associations for the open access mode of publication; we also observe ACM's orientation toward AI-focused periodicals, and most importantly, a significant theme overlap among periodicals of the same association and this is valid for both ACM and IEEE.

Alexandros Vassiliades, Nikolaos Polatidis, Stamatios Samaras et al.

This study explores the explainability capabilities of large language models (LLMs), when employed to autonomously generate machine learning (ML) solutions. We examine two classification tasks: (i) a binary classification problem focused on predicting driver alertness states, and (ii) a multilabel classification problem based on the yeast dataset. Three state-of-the-art LLMs (i.e. OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, and DeepSeek) are prompted to design training pipelines for four common classifiers: Random Forest, XGBoost, Multilayer Perceptron, and Long Short-Term Memory networks. The generated models are evaluated in terms of predictive performance (recall, precision, and F1-score) and explainability using SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations). Specifically, we measure Average SHAP Fidelity (Mean Squared Error between SHAP approximations and model outputs) and Average SHAP Sparsity (number of features deemed influential). The results reveal that LLMs are capable of producing effective and interpretable models, achieving high fidelity and consistent sparsity, highlighting their potential as automated tools for interpretable ML pipeline generation. The results show that LLMs can produce effective, interpretable pipelines with high fidelity and consistent sparsity, closely matching manually engineered baselines.

Giannis Christoforidis, Pavlos Kefalas, Apostolos N. Papadopoulos et al.

The rapid growth of users' involvement in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) has led to the expeditious growth of the data on a global scale. The need of accessing and retrieving relevant information close to users' preferences is an open problem which continuously raises new challenges for recommendation systems. The exploitation of Points-of-Interest (POIs) recommendation by existing models is inadequate due to the sparsity and the cold start problems. To overcome these problems many models were proposed in the literature, but most of them ignore important factors such as: geographical proximity, social influence, or temporal and preference dynamics, which tackle their accuracy while personalize their recommendations. In this work, we investigate these problems and present a unified model that jointly learns users and POI dynamics. Our proposal is termed RELINE (REcommendations with muLtIple Network Embeddings). More specifically, RELINE captures: i) the social, ii) the geographical, iii) the temporal influence, and iv) the users' preference dynamics, by embedding eight relational graphs into one shared latent space. We have evaluated our approach against state-of-the-art methods with three large real-world datasets in terms of accuracy. Additionally, we have examined the effectiveness of our approach against the cold-start problem. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that significant performance improvement is achieved in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Dimitrios Rafailidis, Yannis Manolopoulos

Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent conversational systems such as Google's Virtual Assistant and Apple's Siri, interact with human-like responses to users' queries and finish specific tasks. Meanwhile, existing recommendation technologies model users' evolving, diverse and multi-aspect preferences to generate recommendations in various domains/applications, aiming to improve the citizens' daily life by making suggestions. The repertoire of actions is no longer limited to the one-shot presentation of recommendation lists, which can be insufficient when the goal is to offer decision support for the user, by quickly adapting to his/her preferences through conversations. Such an interactive mechanism is currently missing from recommendation systems. This article sheds light on the gap between virtual assistants and recommendation systems in terms of different technological aspects. In particular, we try to answer the most fundamental research question, which are the missing technological factors to implement a personalized intelligent conversational agent for producing accurate recommendations while taking into account how users behave under different conditions. The goal is, instead of adapting humans to machines, to actually provide users with better recommendation services so that machines will be adapted to humans in daily life.