Due to the emergence of several nutrition-related mobile applications and websites in recent years, as well as the massive amount of crowd-sourced nutrition data, searching and finding relevant results has become increasingly difficult for users. This problem becomes even more challenging when dealing with crowd-sourced food names that are noisy and not well-structured. Because food names are short in length, it is difficult to incorporate existing methods to achieve an optimal matching quality. Despite several recent studies on nutrition data, these challenges remain. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-to-rank framework for crowd-sourced food names that has significant real-world applications, including food search and food recommendations. In particular, we propose a deep learning based, multi-modal learning-to-rank model that leverages the text describing a food name and the numerical values that represent its nutritional information. To this end, we also introduce a novel type of loss-function, which extends standard triplets hinge loss function into a multi-modal scenario. The proposed model is flexible and supports various data types as well as an arbitrary number of modalities. The effectiveness of our proposed model is demonstrated through several experiments on real-data, consisting of more than six million instances.

This paper explores the potential of fusing social and sensor data in the cloud, presenting a practice - a travel recommendation system that offers the predicted mood information of people on where and when users wish to travel. The system is built upon a conceptual framework that allows to blend the heterogeneous social and sensor data for integrated analysis, extracting weather-dependant people's mood information from Twitter and meteorological sensor data streams. In order to handle massively streaming data, the system employs various cloud-serving systems, such as Hadoop, HBase, and GSN. Using this scalable system, we performed heavy ETL as well as filtering jobs, resulting in 12 million tweets over four months. We then derived a rich set of interesting findings through the data fusion, proving that our approach is effective and scalable, which can serve as an important basis in fusing social and sensor data in the cloud.

TweetSpector is a tool for demonstrating entity-based of retrieval of tweets. The various features of this tool include: entity profile creation, real-time tweet classification, active improvement of the created profiles through user feedback, and the dashboard displaying different metrics.