Navigating User Experience of ChatGPT-based Conversational Recommender Systems: The Effects of Prompt Guidance and Recommendation Domain

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enable users to articulate their preferences and provide feedback through natural language. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the potential to enhance user engagement with CRS and augment the recommendation process with LLM-generated content has received increasing attention. However, the efficacy of LLM-powered CRS is contingent upon the use of prompts, and the subjective perception of recommendation quality can differ across various recommendation domains. Therefore, we have developed a ChatGPT-based CRS to investigate the impact of these two factors, prompt guidance (PG) and recommendation domain (RD), on the overall user experience of the system. We conducted an online empirical study (N = 100) by employing a mixed-method approach that utilized a between-subjects design for the variable of PG (with vs. without) and a within-subjects design for RD (book recommendations vs. job recommendations). The findings reveal that PG can substantially enhance the system's explainability, adaptability, perceived ease of use, and transparency. Moreover, users are inclined to perceive a greater sense of novelty and demonstrate a higher propensity to engage with and try recommended items in the context of book recommendations as opposed to job recommendations. Furthermore, the influence of PG on certain user experience metrics and interactive behaviors appears to be modulated by the recommendation domain, as evidenced by the interaction effects between the two examined factors. This work contributes to the user-centered evaluation of ChatGPT-based CRS by investigating two prominent factors and offers practical design guidance.

Privacy-Preserved Blockchain-Federated-Learning for Medical Image Analysis Towards Multiple Parties

To share the patient\textquoteright s data in the blockchain network can help to learn the accurate deep learning model for the better prediction of COVID-19 patients. However, privacy (e.g., data leakage) and security (e.g., reliability or trust of data) concerns are the main challenging task for the health care centers. To solve this challenging task, this article designs a privacy-preserving framework based on federated learning and blockchain. In the first step, we train the local model by using the capsule network for the segmentation and classification of the COVID-19 images. The segmentation aims to extract nodules and classification to train the model. In the second step, we secure the local model through the homomorphic encryption scheme. The designed scheme encrypts and decrypts the gradients for federated learning. Moreover, for the decentralization of the model, we design a blockchain-based federated learning algorithm that can aggregate the gradients and update the local model. In this way, the proposed encryption scheme achieves the data provider privacy, and blockchain guarantees the reliability of the shared data. The experiment results demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.

IoTMalware: Android IoT Malware Detection based on Deep Neural Network and Blockchain Technology

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been revolutionizing this world by introducing exciting applications almost in all walks of daily life, such as healthcare, smart cities, smart environments, safety, remote sensing, and many more. This paper proposes a new framework based on the blockchain and deep learning model to provide more security for Android IoT devices. Moreover, our framework is capable to find the malware activities in a real-time environment. The proposed deep learning model analyzes various static and dynamic features extracted from thousands of feature of malware and benign apps that are already stored in blockchain distributed ledger. The multi-layer deep learning model makes decisions by analyzing the previous data and follow some steps. Firstly, it divides the malware feature into multiple level clusters. Secondly, it chooses a unique deep learning model for each malware feature set or cluster. Finally, it produces the decision by combining the results generated from all cluster levels. Furthermore, the decisions and multiple-level clustering data are stored in a blockchain that can be further used to train every specialized cluster for unique data distribution. Also, a customized smart contract is designed to detect deceptive applications through the blockchain framework. The smart contract verifies the malicious application both during the uploading and downloading process of Android apps on the network. Consequently, the proposed framework provides flexibility to features for run-time security regarding malware detection on heterogeneous IoT devices. Finally, the smart contract helps to approve or deny to uploading and downloading harmful Android applications.

Robust X-ray Sparse-view Phase Tomography via Hierarchical Synthesis Convolutional Neural Networks

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based image reconstruction methods have been intensely used for X-ray computed tomography (CT) reconstruction applications. Despite great success, good performance of this data-based approach critically relies on a representative big training data set and a dense convoluted deep network. The indiscriminating convolution connections over all dense layers could be prone to over-fitting, where sampling biases are wrongly integrated as features for the reconstruction. In this paper, we report a robust hierarchical synthesis reconstruction approach, where training data is pre-processed to separate the information on the domains where sampling biases are suspected. These split bands are then trained separately and combined successively through a hierarchical synthesis network. We apply the hierarchical synthesis reconstruction for two important and classical tomography reconstruction scenarios: the spares-view reconstruction and the phase reconstruction. Our simulated and experimental results show that comparable or improved performances are achieved with a dramatic reduction of network complexity and computational cost. This method can be generalized to a wide range of applications including material characterization, in-vivo monitoring and dynamic 4D imaging.

Local Uncertainty Sampling for Large-Scale Multi-Class Logistic Regression

A major challenge for building statistical models in the big data era is that the available data volume far exceeds the computational capability. A common approach for solving this problem is to employ a subsampled dataset that can be handled by available computational resources. In this paper, we propose a general subsampling scheme for large-scale multi-class logistic regression and examine the variance of the resulting estimator. We show that asymptotically, the proposed method always achieves a smaller variance than that of the uniform random sampling. Moreover, when the classes are conditionally imbalanced, significant improvement over uniform sampling can be achieved. Empirical performance of the proposed method is compared to other methods on both simulated and real-world datasets, and these results match and confirm our theoretical analysis.