[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2023.1291329.].
By providing personalized suggestions to users, recommender systems have become essential to numerous online platforms. Collaborative filtering, particularly graph-based approaches using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have demonstrated great results in terms of recommendation accuracy. However, accuracy may not always be the most important criterion for evaluating recommender systems' performance, since beyond-accuracy aspects such as recommendation diversity, serendipity, and fairness can strongly influence user engagement and satisfaction. This review paper focuses on addressing these dimensions in GNN-based recommender systems, going beyond the conventional accuracy-centric perspective. We begin by reviewing recent developments in approaches that improve not only the accuracy-diversity trade-off but also promote serendipity, and fairness in GNN-based recommender systems. We discuss different stages of model development including data preprocessing, graph construction, embedding initialization, propagation layers, embedding fusion, score computation, and training methodologies. Furthermore, we present a look into the practical difficulties encountered in assuring diversity, serendipity, and fairness, while retaining high accuracy. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions for developing more robust GNN-based recommender systems that go beyond the unidimensional perspective of focusing solely on accuracy. This review aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an in-depth understanding of the multifaceted issues that arise when designing GNN-based recommender systems, setting our work apart by offering a comprehensive exploration of beyond-accuracy dimensions.
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2023.1240660.].
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2023.1221744.].
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fdata.2023.1241899.].
Introduction: Big graphs like social network user interactions and customer rating matrices require significant computing resources to maintain. Data owners are now using public cloud resources for storage and computing elasticity. However, existing solutions do not fully address the privacy and ownership protection needs of the key involved parties: data contributors and the data owner who collects data from contributors.
Methods: We propose a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based solution: TEE-Graph for graph spectral analysis of outsourced graphs in the cloud. TEEs are new CPU features that can enable much more efficient confidential computing solutions than traditional software-based cryptographic ones. Our approach has several unique contributions compared to existing confidential graph analysis approaches. (1) It utilizes the unique TEE properties to ensure contributors' new privacy needs, e.g., the right of revocation for shared data. (2) It implements efficient access-pattern protection with a differentially private data encoding method. And (3) it implements TEE-based special analysis algorithms: the Lanczos method and the Nystrom method for efficiently handling big graphs and protecting confidentiality from compromised cloud providers.
Results: The TEE-Graph approach is much more efficient than software crypto approaches and also immune to access-pattern-based attacks. Compared with the best-known software crypto approach for graph spectral analysis, PrivateGraph, we have seen that TEE-Graph has 103-105 times lower computation, storage, and communication costs. Furthermore, the proposed access-pattern protection method incurs only about 10%-25% of the overall computation cost.
Discussion: Our experimentation showed that TEE-Graph performs significantly better and has lower costs than typical software approaches. It also addresses the unique ownership and access-pattern issues that other TEE-related graph analytics approaches have not sufficiently studied. The proposed approach can be extended to other graph analytics problems with strong ownership and access-pattern protection.
The concept of the "metaverse" has garnered significant attention recently, positioned as the "next frontier" of the internet. This emerging digital realm carries substantial economic and financial implications for both IT and non-IT industries. However, the integration and evolution of these virtual universes bring forth a multitude of intricate issues and quandaries that demand resolution. Within this research endeavor, our objective was to delve into and appraise the array of challenges, privacy concerns, and security issues that have come to light during the development of metaverse virtual environments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a meticulous review and analysis of literature spanning from January 2020 to December 2022, we have meticulously identified and scrutinized 29 distinct challenges, along with 12 policy, privacy, and security matters intertwined with the metaverse. Among the challenges we unearthed, the foremost were concerns pertaining to the costs associated with hardware and software, implementation complexities, digital disparities, and the ethical and moral quandaries surrounding socio-control, collectively cited by 43%, 40%, and 33% of the surveyed articles, respectively. Turning our focus to policy, privacy, and security issues, the top three concerns that emerged from our investigation encompassed the formulation of metaverse rules and principles, the encroachment of privacy threats within the metaverse, and the looming challenges concerning data management, all mentioned in 43%, 40%, and 33% of the examined literature. In summation, the development of virtual environments within the metaverse is a multifaceted and dynamically evolving domain, offering both opportunities and hurdles for researchers and practitioners alike. It is our aspiration that the insights, challenges, and recommendations articulated in this report will catalyze extensive dialogues among industry stakeholders, governmental bodies, and other interested parties concerning the metaverse's destiny and the world they aim to construct or bequeath to future generations.