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The article focuses on the challenges and emerging expectations regarding the trustworthiness of recommendation and search systems, particularly in adapting to various use cases and ensuring robustness, interpretability, security, privacy, and fairness. It introduces a special section dedicated to novel research in this field, with a focus on promoting responsible AI applications and advancing techniques for the wider public.

The article presents the discussion on recommendation and search systems becoming indispensable means for helping web users. Topics include applications of such systems being multi-faceted containing targeted advertising, intelligent medical assistant, and e-commerce; and robustness evaluating a model's performance consistency under various operating conditions like noisy data.

Newly emerging location-based and event-based social network services provide us with a new platform to understand users' preferences based on their activity history. A user can only visit a limited number of venues/events and most of them are within a limited distance range, so the user-item matrix is very sparse, which creates a big challenge to the traditional collaborative filtering-based recommender systems. The problem becomes even more challenging when people travel to a new city where they have no activity information. In this article, we propose LCARS, a location-content-aware recommender system that offers a particular user a set of venues (e.g., restaurants and shopping malls) or events (e.g., concerts and exhibitions) by giving consideration to both personal interest and local preference. This recommender system can facilitate people's travel not only near the area in which they live, but also in a city that is new to them. Specifically, LCARS consists of two components: offline modeling and online recommendation. The offline modeling part, called LCA-LDA, is designed to learn the interest of each individual user and the local preference of each individual city by capturing item cooccurrence patterns and exploiting item contents. The online recommendation part takes a querying user along with a querying city as input, and automatically combines the learned interest of the querying user and the local preference of the querying city to produce the top-k recommendations. To speed up the online process, a scalable query processing technique is developed by extending both the Threshold Algorithm (TA) and TA-approximation algorithm. We evaluate the performance of our recommender system on two real datasets, that is, DoubanEvent and Foursquare, and one large-scale synthetic dataset. The results show the superiority of LCARS in recommending spatial items for users, especially when traveling to new cities, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Besides, the experimental analysis results also demonstrate the excellent interpretability of LCARS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In the context of drug discovery, drug target interactions (DTIs) can be predicted based on observed topological features of a semantic network across the chemical and biological space. In a semantic network, the types of the nodes and links are different. In order to take into account the heterogeneity of the semantic network, meta-path-based topological patterns were investigated for link prediction. Results: Supervised machine learning models were constructed based on meta-path topological features of an enriched semantic network, which was derived from Chem2Bio2RDF, and was expanded by adding compound and protein similarity neighboring links obtained from the PubChem databases. The additional semantic links significantly improved the predictive performance of the supervised learning models. The binary classification model built upon the enriched feature space using the Random Forest algorithm significantly outperformed an existing semantic link prediction algorithm, Semantic Link Association Prediction (SLAP), to predict unknown links between compounds and protein targets in an evolving network. In addition to link prediction, Random Forest also has an intrinsic feature ranking algorithm, which can be used to select the important topological features that contribute to link prediction. Conclusions: The proposed framework has been demonstrated as a powerful alternative to SLAP in order to predict DTIs using the semantic network that integrates chemical, pharmacological, genomic, biological, functional, and biomedical information into a unified framework. It offers the flexibility to enrich the feature space by using different normalization processes on the topological features, and it can perform model construction and feature selection at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is an integration of distributed sensor networks with computational devices. CPS claims many promising applications, such as traffic observation, battlefield surveillance, and sensor-network-based monitoring. One important topic in CPS research is about the atypical event analysis, that is, retrieving the events from massive sensor data and analyzing them with spatial, temporal, and other multidimensional information. Many traditional methods are not feasible for such analysis since they cannot describe the complex atypical events. In this paper, we propose a novel model of atypical cluster to effectively represent such events and efficiently retrieve them from massive data. The basic cluster is designed to summarize an individual event, and the macrocluster is used to integrate the information from multiple events. To facilitate scalable, flexible, and online analysis, the atypical cube is constructed, and a guided clustering algorithm is proposed to retrieve significant clusters in an efficient manner. We conduct experiments on real sensor datasets with the size of more than 50GB; the results show that the proposed method can provide more accurate information with only 15% to 20% time cost of the baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]