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Dynamic ridesharing refers to services that arrange one-time shared rides on short notice. It underpins various real-world intelligent transportation applications such as car-pooling, food delivery and last-mile logistics. A core operation in dynamic ridesharing is the "insertion operator". Given a worker and a feasible route which contains a sequence of origin-destination pairs from previous requests, the insertion operator inserts a new origin-destination pair from a newly arrived request into the current route such that certain objective is optimized. Common optimization objectives include minimizing the \rev{maximum/sum} flow time of all requests and minimizing the total travel time of the worker. Despite its frequent usage, the insertion operator has a time complexity of $O(n^3)$ , where $n$ is the number of all requests assigned to the worker. The cubic running time of insertion fundamentally limits the efficiency of urban-scale dynamic ridesharing based applications. In this paper, we propose a novel partition framework and a dynamic programming based insertion with a time complexity of $O(n^2)$ . We further improve the time efficiency of the insertion operator to $O(n)$ harnessing efficient index structures, such as fenwick tree. Evaluations on two real-world large-scale datasets show that our methods can accelerate insertion by 1.5 to 998.1 times.

Transportation recommendation is one important map service in navigation applications. Previous transportation recommendation solutions fail to deliver satisfactory user experience because their recommendations only consider routes in one transportation mode (uni-modal, e.g., taxi, bus, cycle) and largely overlook situational context. In this work, we propose Hydra, a multi-task deep learning based recommendation system that offers multi-modal transportation planning and is adaptive to various situational context (e.g., nearby point-of-interest~(POI) distribution and weather). We design a novel two-level framework that integrates uni-modal and multi-modal~(e.g., taxi-bus, bus-cycle) routes as well as heterogeneous urban data for intelligent multi-modal transportation recommendation. In addition to urban context features constructed from multi-source urban data, we learn the latent representations of users, origin-destination~(OD) pairs and transportation modes based on user implicit feedbacks. Moreover, we propose two models to recommend the proper route among various uni-modal and multi-modal transportation routes: (1) a light-weight gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) based recommendation model; and (2) a multi-task wide and deep learning (MTWDL) based recommendation model. We also optimize the framework to support real-time, large-scale route query and recommendation. We deploy Hydra on Baidu Maps, one of the world's largest map services. The GBDT based model and MTWDL based variants achieve 82.8% and 96.6% relative improvement of user click ratio, respectively.

General-purpose topic models have widespread industrial applications. Yet high-quality topic modeling is becoming increasingly challenging because accurate models require large amounts of training data typically owned by multiple parties, who are often unwilling to share their sensitive data for collaborative training without guarantees on their data privacy. To enable effective privacy-preserving multiparty topic modeling, we propose a novel federated general-purpose topic model named private and consistent topic discovery (PC-TD). On the one hand, PC-TD seamlessly integrates differential privacy in topic modeling to provide privacy guarantees on sensitive data of different parties. On the other hand, PC-TD exploits multiple sources of semantic consistency information to retain the accuracy of topic modeling while protecting data privacy. We verify the effectiveness of PC-TD on real-life datasets. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over the state-of-the-art general-purpose topic models.

The semantic web has enabled the creation of a growing number of knowledge bases (KBs), which are designed independently using different techniques. Integration of KBs has attracted much attention as different KBs usually contain overlapping and complementary information. Automatic techniques for KB integration have been improved but far from perfect. Therefore, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge base semantic integration using crowd intelligence. There are both classes and instances in a KB, in our work, we propose a novel hybrid framework for KB semantic integration considering the semantic heterogeneity of KB class structures. We first perform semantic integration of the class structures via crowdsourcing, then apply the blocking-based instance matching approach according to the integrated class structure. For class structure (taxonomy) semantic integration, the crowd is leveraged to help identifying the semantic relationships between classes to handle the semantic heterogeneity problem. Under the conditions of both large scale KBs and limited monetary budget for crowdsourcing, we formalize the class structure (taxonomy) semantic integration problem as a Local Tree Based Query Selection (LTQS) problem. We show that the LTQS problem is NP-hard and propose two greedy-based algorithms, i.e., static query selection and adaptive query selection. Furthermore, the KBs are usually of large scales and have millions of instances, direct pairwise-based instance matching is inefficient. Therefore, we adopt the blocking-based strategy for instance matching, taking advantage of the class structure (taxonomy) integration result. The experiments on real large scale KBs verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.

Ride hailing has become prevailing. Central in ride hailing platforms is taxi order dispatching which involves recommending a suitable driver for each order. Previous works use pure combinatorial optimization solutions for taxi dispatching, which suffer in practice due to complex dynamics of demand and supply and temporal dependency among dispatching decisions. Recent studies try to adopt data-driven method into combinatorial optimization hoping knowledge from history data would help overcome these challenges. Among these attempts, adoption of reinforcement learning shows great promise but current adoptions are a unidirectional integration which restricts the potential performance gains. In this work, we propose \underline{L}earning \underline{T}o \underline{D}ispatch(\algoname), a systematic solution that allows synergic integration of reinforcement learning and combinatorial optimization for large-scale taxi order dispatching. We demonstrate the necessity of online learning and taxi scheduling for reinforcement learning to work in synergy with combinatorial optimization, and devise corresponding algorithms. We also devise many tricks for more efficient calculation of the bipartite matching. Experiments show our methods can improve 36.4% and 42.0% on utility and efficiency at most, respectively. Especially, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of utility.

Range aggregation is a primitive operation in spatial data applications and there is a growing demand to support such operations over a data federation, where the entire spatial data are separately held by multiple data providers (a.k.a., data silos). Data federations notably increase the amount of data available for data-intensive applications such as smart mobility planning and public health emergency responses. Yet they also challenge the conventional implementation of range aggregation queries because the raw data cannot be shared within the federation and the data partition at each data silo is fixed during query processing. These constraints limit the design space of distributed range aggregation query processing. In this work, we propose approximate algorithms for efficient range aggregation over spatial data federation. We devise novel single-silo sampling algorithms that process queries in parallel and design a level sampling based algorithm which reduces the time complexity of local queries at each data silo to O(log 1/), where is the approximation ratio of the accuracy guarantee. Extensive evaluations with real-world data show that compared with state-of-the-arts, our solutions reduce the time cost and communication cost by up to 85.1x and 5.5x respectively, with average approximate errors of below 2.8%.

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 and Online To Offline (O2O) marketing model, various online e vent- b ased s ocial n etwork s (EBSNs) are getting popular. An important task of EBSNs is to facilitate the most satisfactory event-participant arrangement for both sides, i.e., events enroll more participants and participants are arranged with personally interesting events. Existing approaches usually focus on the arrangement of each single event to a set of potential users, or ignore the conflicts between different events, which leads to infeasible or redundant arrangements. In this paper, to address the shortcomings of existing approaches, we first identify a more general and useful event-participant arrangement problem, called G lobal E vent-participant A rrangement with C onflict and C apacity ( $GEACC$ ) problem, focusing on the conflicts of different events and making event-participant arrangements in a global view. We find that the GEACC problem is NP-hard due to the conflicts among events. Thus, we design two approximation algorithms with provable approximation ratios and an exact algorithm with pruning technique to address this problem. In addition, we propose an online setting of GEACC, called OnlineGEACC, which is also practical in real-world scenarios. We further design an online algorithm with provable performance guarantee. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets.

With the rapid development of smartphones, spatial crowdsourcing platforms are getting popular. A foundational research of spatial crowdsourcing is to allocate micro-tasks to suitable crowd workers. Many existing studies focus on the offline scenario, where all the spatiotemporal information of micro-tasks and crowd workers is given. In this paper, we focus on the online scenario and identify a more practical micro-task allocation problem, called the G lobal O nline M icro-task A llocation in spatial crowdsourcing (GOMA) problem. We first extend the state-of-the-art algorithm for the online maximum weighted bipartite matching problem to the GOMA problem as the baseline algorithm. Although the baseline algorithm provides a theoretical guarantee for the worst case, its average performance in practice is not good enough since the worst case happens with a very low probability in the real world. Thus, we consider the average performance of online algorithms, a.k.a. random order model. We propose a two-phase-based framework, based on which we present the TGOA algorithm with a $\frac{1}{4}$ 1 4 -competitive ratio under the random order model. To improve its efficiency, we further design the TGOA-Greedy and TGOA-OP algorithm following this framework, which runs faster than the TGOA algorithm with a competitive ratio of $\frac{1}{8}$ 1 8 and $\frac{1}{4}$ 1 4 , respectively. We also revisit the average performance of Greedy, which has long been considered as the worst due to its unbounded competitive ratio in the worst case. Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets.