Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in urban mobility applications. Recently, POI recommendation models based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been extensively studied and achieved, however, the effective incorporation of both spatial and temporal information into such GNN-based models remains challenging. Temporal information is extracted from users' trajectories, while spatial information is obtained from POIs. Extracting distinct fine-grained features unique to each piece of information is difficult since temporal information often includes spatial information, as users tend to visit nearby POIs. To address the challenge, we propose Mobility Graph Transformer (MobGT) that enables us to fully leverage graphs to capture both the spatial and temporal features in users' mobility patterns. MobGT combines individual spatial and temporal graph encoders to capture unique features and global user-location relations. Additionally, it incorporates a mobility encoder based on Graph Transformer to extract higher-order information between POIs. To address the long-tailed problem in spatial-temporal data, MobGT introduces a novel loss function, Tail Loss. Experimental results demonstrate that MobGT outperforms state-of-the-art models on various datasets and metrics, achieving 24% improvement on average. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Yukayo/MobGT.

Graph representation learning resurges as a trending research subject owing to the widespread use of deep learning for Euclidean data, which inspire various creative designs of neural networks in the non-Euclidean domain, particularly graphs. With the success of these graph neural networks (GNN) in the static setting, we approach further practical scenarios where the graph dynamically evolves. Existing approaches typically resort to node embeddings and use a recurrent neural network (RNN, broadly speaking) to regulate the embeddings and learn the temporal dynamics. These methods require the knowledge of a node in the full time span (including both training and testing) and are less applicable to the frequent change of the node set. In some extreme scenarios, the node sets at different time steps may completely differ. To resolve this challenge, we propose EvolveGCN, which adapts the graph convolutional network (GCN) model along the temporal dimension without resorting to node embeddings. The proposed approach captures the dynamism of the graph sequence through using an RNN to evolve the GCN parameters. Two architectures are considered for the parameter evolution. We evaluate the proposed approach on tasks including link prediction, edge classification, and node classification. The experimental results indicate a generally higher performance of EvolveGCN compared with related approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/EvolveGCN.

As COVID-19 transmissions spread worldwide, governments have announced and enforced travel restrictions to prevent further infections. Such restrictions have a direct effect on the volume of international flights among these countries, resulting in extensive social and economic costs. To better understand the situation in a quantitative manner, we analyzed the OpenSky Network data to clarify flight patterns and flight densities around the world. Then we observed relationships between flight numbers with new infection cases and the economy (the unemployment rate) in Barcelona. We found that the number of daily flights gradually decreased and then suddenly dropped 64% during the second half of March in 2020 after the United States and Europe enacted travel restrictions. We also observed a 51% decrease in the global flight network density decreased during this period. Regarding new COVID-19 cases, the United States had an unexpected surge regardless of travel restrictions. Finally, the layoffs for temporary workers in the tourism and airplane business increased by 4.3 fold in the weeks following Spain's decision to close its borders.

Graph pattern matching algorithms to handle million-scale dynamic graphs are widely used in many applications such as social network analytics and suspicious transaction detections from financial networks. On the other hand, the computation complexity of many graph pattern matching algorithms is expensive, and it is not affordable to extract patterns from million-scale graphs. Moreover, most real-world networks are time-evolving, updating their structures continuously, which makes it harder to update and output newly matched patterns in real time. Many incremental graph pattern matching algorithms which reduce the number of updates have been proposed to handle such dynamic graphs. However, it is still challenging to recompute vertices in the incremental graph pattern matching algorithms in a single process, and that prevents the real-time analysis. We propose an incremental graph pattern matching algorithm to deal with time-evolving graph data and also propose an adaptive optimization system based on reinforcement learning to recompute vertices in the incremental process more efficiently. Then we discuss the qualitative efficiency of our system with several types of data graphs and pattern graphs. We evaluate the performance using million-scale attributed and time-evolving social graphs. Our incremental algorithm is up to 10.1 times faster than an existing graph pattern matching and 1.95 times faster with the adaptive systems in a computation node than naive incremental processing.

Community detections for large-scale real world networks have been more popular in social analytics. In particular, dynamically growing network analyses become important to find long-term trends and detect anomalies. In order to analyze such networks, we need to obtain many snapshots and apply same analytic methods to them. However, it is inefficient to extract communities from these whole newly generated networks with little differences every time, and then it is impossible to follow the network growths in the real time. We proposed an incremental community detection algorithm for high-volume graph streams. It is based on the top of a well-known batch-oriented algorithm named DEMON [1]. We also evaluated performance and precisions of our proposed incremental algorithm with real-world big networks with up to 410,236 vertices and 2,439,437 edges and computed in less than one second to detect communities in an incremental fashion - which achieves up to 107 times faster than the original algorithm without sacrificing accuracies.

This paper describes highly scalable X10-based agent simulation platform called XAXIS. XAXIS is designed to handle millions or billions of agents on recent highly distributed and parallel computing environments with more than hundreds of CPU cores. To make the runtime scalable on such environments, we need to redesign and implement the simulation middleware. In this paper, we propose the software design, implementation on X10, one of the state-of-the-art PGAS language, and then application to large-scale traffic simulation. By using 192 CPU cores in distributed memory computing environment, the performance scalability is achieved with a traffic simulation.