The fast increase in ad-blocker usage has resulted in significant revenue loss for online publishers. To mitigate this, many publishers implement the Wall strategy, where an adblock user is asked to whitelist the intended webpage. If the user refuses, the result is a loss-loss situation: the user is denied access to content, and the publisher cannot receive revenue. An alternative strategy, called AAX, is to show only acceptable ads to users. However, acceptable ads generate less revenue than regular ads. This article proposes personalized counter ad-blocking that dynamically chooses a counter ad-blocking strategy for individual users. To implement it, we propose a novel deep learning-based whitelist prediction model. Adblock users predicted to whitelist a page receive the Wall strategy; the others receive the AAX strategy. The proposed Deep Ad-Block Whitelist Network (DAWN) for whitelist prediction captures page characteristics, user interests in pages and their sensitivity to ads, reflected in historic behavior, using a deep learning mechanism. Furthermore, DAWN leverages multi-task learning on whitelist prediction and dwell-time prediction to boost performance. DAWN's effectiveness is validated on a real-world dataset provided by Forbes Media. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed counter ad-blocking policy over existing policies on revenue generation and user engagement.

Fine-grained location prediction on smart phones can be used to improve app/system performance. Application scenarios include video quality adaptation as a function of the 5G network quality at predicted user locations, and augmented reality apps that speed up content rendering based on predicted user locations. Such use cases require prediction error in the same range as the GPS error, and no existing works on location prediction can achieve this level of accuracy. We propose Federated Meta-Location Learning (FMLL) on smart phones for fine-grained location prediction, based on GPSt races collected on the phones. FMLL has three components: a meta-location generation module, a prediction model, and a federated learning framework. The meta-location generation module represents the user location data as relative points in an abstract 2D space, which enables learning across different physical spaces. The model fuses Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), where BiLSTM learns the speed and direction of the mobile users, and CNN learns information such as user movement preferences. The framework runs on the phones of the users and also on a server that coordinates learning from all users in the system. FMLL uses federated learning to protect user privacy and reduce bandwidth consumption. Our experimental results, using a dataset with over 600,000 users, demonstrate that FMLL outperforms baseline models in terms of prediction accuracy. We also demonstrate that FMLL works well in conjunction with transfer learning, which enables model reusability. Finally, benchmark results on Android phones demonstrate FMLL’s feasibility in real life.

Traditional page recommendation models are endangered by stricter privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The performance of these models suffer when only a part of the users share their personal data, such as cookies, with web servers, while the rest of the users choose to opt-out from sharing these data. Furthermore, these models are not designed to provide recommendations for users who do not share their data. This paper addresses the question of how to provide good page recommendations to all users, independent of their privacy attitudes. We propose Fed4Rec, a privacy-preserving framework for page recommendation based on federated learning (FL) and model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML), which allows machine learning models to train on data collected from both public users, who share data with the server, and private users, who do not share data with the server. Fed4Rec enables recommendations for both public users, computed at the server, and private users, computed at their local devices. Private users' data are stored only on user devices and never shared with the server. FL is used to train on local data, and Fed4Rec shares with the server only partial model parameters, computed on local devices. MAML is used to jointly train on the public data and the model parameters from the private users. We compare Fed4Rec against several baseline frameworks, using a publicly available dataset from a large news portal. The results show that Fed4Rec outperforms the baselines in terms of recommendation accuracy. We also conduct one ablation study to examine the impact of varying the ratio between the number of public and private users. Fed4Rec performs better than the baselines for all ratios, but it is especially beneficial w hen t he p ercentage of public users is low.

Corporations spend billions of dollars annually caring for customers across multiple contact channels. A customer journey is the complete sequence of contacts that a given customer has with a company across multiple channels of communication. While each contact is important and contains rich information, studying customer journeys provides a better context to understand customers' behavior in order to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and to reduce care costs. However, journey sequences have a complex format due to the heterogeneity of user behavior: they are variable-length, multi-attribute, and exhibit a large cardinality in categories (e.g. contact reasons). The question of how to characterize and learn representations of customer journeys has not been studied in the literature. We propose to learn journey embeddings using a sequence-to-sequence framework that converts each customer journey into a fixed-length latent embedding. In order to improve the disentanglement and distributional properties of embeddings, the model is further modified by incorporating a Wasserstein autoencoder inspired regularization on the distribution of embeddings. Experiments conducted on an enterprise-scale dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and reveal significant improvements due to the regularization in both distinguishing journey pattern characteristics and predicting future customer engagement.

Cellular traffic prediction enables operators to adapt to traffic demand in real-time for improving network resource utilization and user experience. To predict cellular traffic, previous studies either applied Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) at individual base stations or adapted Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to work at grid-cells in a geographically defined grid. These solutions do not consider explicitly the effect of handover on the spatial characteristics of the traffic, which may lead to lower prediction accuracy. Furthermore, RNN solutions are slow to train, and CNN-grid solutions do not work for cells and are difficult to apply to base stations. This paper proposes a new prediction model, STGCN-HO, that uses the transition probability matrix of the handover graph to improve traffic prediction. STGCN-HO builds a stacked residual neural network structure incorporating graph convolutions and gated linear units to capture both spatial and temporal aspects of the traffic. Unlike RNN, STGCN-HO is fast to train and simultaneously predicts traffic demand for all base stations based on the information gathered from the whole graph. Unlike CNN-grid, STGCN-HO can make predictions not only for base stations, but also for cells within base stations. Experiments using data from a large cellular network operator demonstrate that our model outperforms existing solutions in terms of prediction accuracy.

The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to build a wall that requires users to whitelist the site for content access. However, there is lack of studies on the impact of these two counter-ad-blocking strategies on user behaviors. To address this issue, we conduct a randomized field experiment on the website of Forbes Media, a major US media publisher. The ad-blocker users are divided into a treatment group, which receives the wall strategy, and a control group, which receives the acceptable ads strategy. We utilize the difference-in-differences method to estimate the causal effects. Our study shows that the wall strategy has an overall negative impact on user engagements. However, it has no statistically significant effect on high-engaged users as they would view the pages no matter what strategy is used. It has a big impact on low-engaged users, who have no loyalty to the site. Our study also shows that revisiting behavior decreases over time, but the ratio of session whitelisting increases over time as the remaining users have relatively high loyalty and high engagement. The paper concludes with discussions of managerial insights for publishers when determining counter-ad-blocking strategies.

The fast increase in ad blocker usage results in large revenue loss for online publishers and advertisers. Many publishers initialize counter-ad-blocking strategies, where a user has to choose either whitelisting the publisher's web site in their ad blocker or leaving the site without accessing the content. This paper aims to predict the user whitelisting behavior, which can help online publishers to better assess users' interests and design corresponding strategies. We present several techniques for personalized whitelist prediction for a target user and a target web page. Our prediction models are evaluated on real-world data provided by a large online publisher, Forbes Media. The best prediction performance was achieved using the gradient boosting regression tree model, which also demonstrated robustness and efficiency.

Display advertising is the most important revenue source for publishers in the online publishing industry. The ad pricing standards are shifting to a new model in which ads are paid only if they are viewed. Consequently, an important problem for publishers is to predict the probability that an ad at a given page depth will be shown on a user's screen for a certain dwell time. This paper proposes deep learning models based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to predict the viewability of any page depth for any given dwell time. The main novelty of our best model consists in the combination of bi-directional LSTM networks, encoder-decoder structure, and residual connections. The experimental results over a dataset collected from a large online publisher demonstrate that the proposed LSTM-based sequential neural networks outperform the comparison methods in terms of prediction performance.

Applying Machine Learning (ML) to business applications for automation usually faces difficulties when integrating diverse ML dependencies and services, mainly because of the lack of a common ML framework. In most cases, the ML models are developed for applications which are targeted for specific business domain use cases, leading to duplicated effort, and making reuse impossible. This paper presents Acumos, an open platform capable of packaging ML models into portable containerized microservices which can be easily shared via the platform's catalog, and can be integrated into various business applications. We present a case study of packaging sentiment analysis and classification ML models via the Acumos platform, permitting easy sharing with others. We demonstrate that the Acumos platform reduces the technical burden on application developers when applying machine learning models to their business applications. Furthermore, the platform allows the reuse of readily available ML microservices in various business domains.

A half of online display ads are not rendered viewable because the users do not scroll deep enough or spend sufficient time at the page depth where the ads are placed. In order to increase the marketing efficiency and ad effectiveness, there is a strong demand for viewability prediction from both advertisers and publishers. This paper aims to predict the dwell time for a given triplet based on historic data collected by publishers. This problem is difficult because of user behavior variability and data sparsity. To solve it, we propose predictive models based on Factorization Machines and Field‐aware Factorization Machines in order to overcome the data sparsity issue and provide flexibility to add auxiliary information such as the visible area of a user's browser. In addition, we leverage the prior dwell time behavior of the user within the current page view, that is, time series information, to further improve the proposed models. Experimental results using data from a large web publisher demonstrate that the proposed models outperform comparison models. Also, the results show that adding time series information further improves the performance.