Friend recall is an important way to improve Daily Active Users (DAU) in online games. The problem is to generate a proper inactive (lost) friend ranking list essentially. Traditional friend recall methods focus on rules like friend intimacy or training a classifier for predicting lost players' return probability, but ignore feature information of (active) players and historical friend recall events. In this work, we treat friend recall as a link prediction problem and explore several link prediction methods which can use features of both active and lost players, as well as historical events. Furthermore, we propose a novel Edge Transformer model and pre-train the model via masked auto-encoders. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the offline experiments and online A/B Tests of three Tencent games.

Daily schedule recommendation is an intelligent approach to recommend multiple suitable activity locations and activity sequences for users based on their needs in a day. In such a scenario, training the model using traditional methods requires centralized data collection from individual users, which may be prohibited by data protection acts, such as GDPR and CCPA. In this paper, we address the problem of daily schedule recommendation utilizing the deep reinforcement learning model in a federated learning framework (FedDSR). And curriculum learning is applied to guide the training process towards better local optimization and better generalization. For the uploaded local parameters, a similarity aggregation algorithm is proposed to improve the quality of the model. The experimental results show that the proposed FedDSR model is superior and effective to multiple baselines on two real datasetsGeolifeandChengdu. Comparing with baselines, our method not only ensures that the parties do not need to share data and thus achieve joint modeling, but also can exceed$\sim\!\! 18\%$under evaluation metricperimeterand improve$\sim\! 0.72\%$under evaluation metricADTS.

Recommender system can provide users with the required information accurately and efficiently, playing a very important role in improving users' life experience. Although knowledge graph-based recommender system can solve the sparsity and cold start problems faced by traditional recommender system, it cannot handle the cross-domain cold start problem and cannot provide multi-domain recommendations. Therefore, this paper focuses on multi-domain item-item (I2I) recommendation based on cross-domain knowledge graph embedding by analyzing the association between items of the same domain and the interaction between items of diverse domains with the aid of knowledge graph that contains rich information. Firstly, a cross-domain knowledge graph chiasmal embedding approach is proposed to efficiently interact all items in multiple domains. To help achieve both homo-domain embedding and hetero-domain embedding of items, a binding rule is put forward. Secondly, a multi-domain I2I recommendation method is presented to efficiently recommend items in multiple domains, which is a recommendation method based on link prediction of knowledge graph. Finally, the proposed methods are compared and analyzed with some benchmark methods using two datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve better link prediction results and multi-domain recommendation results.

Urban flow analysis is an essential research for smart city construction, in which urban flow pattern analysis focuses on the continuous state of urban flow. How to mine, store and reuse traffic patterns from urban multi-source heterogeneous big data is challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a knowledge mining network for regional flow pattern to mine and store the urban flow pattern. The proposed model consists of two modules. In the first module, the features of the region and its flow pattern are extracted as the entity and relation, respectively. In the second module, POI features are modeled to enhance the embedding representation of relation and entity. Based on the translation distance method, the knowledge triplets of regional flow patterns are mined. Finally, the proposed model is compared with some benchmark methods using Chengdu Didi order and POI datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed model is effective. In addition, the knowledge triplets are visualized and some application examples are introduced.

As travel efficiency matters to the work productivity of cities, shortening passengers' travel time for metros is therefore a pressing need. To this end, we study a strategy by dynamically scheduling dwell time for trains. Developing such a strategy is challenging because of three aspects: 1) Optimizing the average travel time of passengers needs to properly balance passengers' waiting time at platforms and journey time on trains, as well as considering long-term impacts; 2) Capturing dynamic spatio-temporal (ST) correlations of incoming passengers for metro stations is difficult; and 3) For each train, the dwell time scheduling is affected by other trains, which is hard to measure. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel deep neural network, entitled AutoDwell. Specifically, AutoDwell optimizes the long-term rewards of dwell time settings in terms of passengers' waiting and journey time by a reinforcement learning framework. Next, AutoDwell employs gated recurrent units and graph attention networks to extract the ST correlations of the passenger flows among metro stations. Moreover, attention mechanisms are leveraged in AutoDwell for capturing the interactions between the trains. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of AutoDwell over several baselines, capable of saving passengers' travel time significantly.

Urban metro flow prediction is of great value for metro operation scheduling, passenger flow management and personal travel planning. However, the problem is challenging. First, different metro stations, e.g. transfer stations and non-transfer stations have unique traffic patterns. Second, it is difficult to model complex spatio-temporal dynamic relation of metro stations. To address these challenges, we develop a spatio-temporal dynamic graph relational learning model (STDGRL) to predict urban metro station flow. First, we propose a spatio-temporal node embedding representation module to capture the traffic patterns of different stations. Second, we employ a dynamic graph relationship learning module to learn dynamic spatial relationships between metro stations without a predefined graph adjacency matrix. Finally, we provide a transformer-based long-term relationship prediction module for long-term metro flow prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted based on metro data in four cities, China, with experimental results demonstrating the advantages of our method compared over 14 baselines for urban metro flow prediction.

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) are of great importance to saving people's lives from emergent accidents and diseases by efficiently picking up patients using ambulances. The transporting capability of an EMS system (e.g., defined as the average pickup time of patients) significantly depends on the real-time redeployment strategy of ambulances. That is, which station should an ambulance be redeployed to, after it becomes available (after it transports a patient to a hospital or after it finishes the in-site treatment for a patient)? However, it is a challenging task concerning with the multiple data D1-D5 as detailed in Introduction. To this end, in this paper, we propose a data-driven real-time ambulance redeployment approach that redeploys an ambulance to a proper station after it becomes available, so as to optimize the transporting capability of an EMS system, considering the aforementioned multiple data D1-D5. Specifically, the proposed approach is comprised of two stages to well consider the D1-D5. First, we propose a method (a safety time-based urgency index) to incorporate D1, D2, and D3 into each ambulance station's urgency degree (D*). Second, we propose an optimal matching algorithm to combine D*, D4, and D5 into the redeployment of the current available ambulance. Experimental results using data collected in real world demonstrate the significant advantages of our approach over many baselines. Comparing with baselines, our approach can save ~4 minutes (~35 percent) of the average pickup time for each patient, improve the ratio of patients picked up within 10 minutes from 0.684 and 0.803 (~17 percent), and largely enhance the survival rate of patients (~12 percent for patients in category A1 and ~17 percent for patients in A2).

Ordering take-out food (a.k.a. takeaway food) on online-to-offline (O2O) food ordering and delivery platforms is becoming a new lifestyle for people living in big cities, thanks to its great convenience. Web users and mobile device users can order take-out food (i.e. obtain online food ordering services) on an O2O platform. Then the O2O platform will dispatch food carriers to deliver food from restaurants to users, i.e. providing users with offline food delivery services. For an O2O food ordering and delivery platform, improving food delivery efficiency, given the massive number of food orders each day and the limited number of food carriers, is of paramount importance to reducing the length of time users wait for their food. Thus, in this paper, we study the food delivery task grouping problem so as to improve food delivery efficiency and alleviate the pain of waiting for users, which to the best of our knowledge has not been studied yet. However, the food delivery task grouping problem is challenging, given two reasons. First, the food delivery efficiency is affected by multiple factors, which are non-trivial to formulate and jointly consider. Second, the problem is a typical NP-hard problem and to find near-optimal grouping results is not easy. To address these two issues, we propose an effective task grouping method. On one hand, we provide formal formulations for the factors affecting the food delivery efficiency, and provide an objective to organically combine these factors such that it can better guide the task grouping. On the other hand, we propose heuristic algorithms to efficiently obtain effective task grouping results, consisting of a greedy algorithm and a replacement algorithm. We evaluate our task grouping method using take-out food order data from web users and mobile device users on a real-world O2O food ordering and delivery platform. Experiment results demonstrate that our task grouping method can save ~ 16% (87 seconds) of average waiting time for each user, comparing with many baseline methods. It indicates that our method is able to significantly improve the food delivery efficiency and can provide better food delivery services for users.

Emergency medical service provides a variety of services for those in need of emergency care. One of the major challenges encountered by emergency service providers is selecting the appropriate locations for ambulance stations. Prior works measure spatial proximity under Euclidean space or static road network. In this paper, we focus on locating the ambulance stations by using the real traffic information so as to minimize the average travel-time to reach the emergency requests. To this end, we estimate the travel-time of road segments using real GPS trajectories and propose an efficient PAM-based refinement for the location problem. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations using real emergency requests collected from Tianjin, and the result shows that the proposed solution can reduce the travel-time to reach the emergency requests by 29.9% when compared to the original locations of ambulance stations.