Publications

A context-aware recommender system (CARS) applies sensing and analysis of user context to provide personalized services. The contextual information can be driven from sensors in order to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. Yet, generating accurate recommendations is not enough to constitute a useful system from the users' perspective, since certain contextual information may cause different issues, such as draining the user's battery, privacy issues, and more. Adding high-dimensional contextual information may increase both the dimensionality and sparsity of the model. Previous studies suggest reducing the amount of contextual information by selecting the most suitable contextual information using a domain knowledge. Another solution is compressing it into a denser latent space, thus disrupting the ability to explain the recommendation item to the user, and damaging users' trust. In this paper we present an approach for selecting low-dimensional subsets of the contextual information and incorporating them explicitly within CARS. Specifically, we present a novel feature-selection algorithm, based on genetic algorithms (GA), that outperforms SOTA dimensional-reduction CARS algorithms, improves the accuracy and the explainability of the recommendations, and allows for controlling user aspects, such as privacy and battery consumption. Furthermore, we exploit the top subsets that are generated along the evolutionary process, by learning multiple deep context-aware models and applying a stacking technique on them, thus improving the accuracy while remaining at the explicit space. We evaluated our approach on two high-dimensional context-aware datasets driven from smartphones. An empirical analysis of our results validates that our proposed approach outperforms SOTA CARS models while improving transparency and explainability to the user.

In recent years machine learning algorithms, and more specifically deep learning algorithms, have been widely used in many fields, including cyber security. However, machine learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and this limits the application of machine learning, especially in non-stationary, adversarial environments, such as the cyber security domain, where actual adversaries (e.g., malware developers) exist. This paper comprehensively summarizes the latest research on adversarial attacks against security solutions based on machine learning techniques and illuminates the risks they pose. First, the adversarial attack methods are characterized based on their stage of occurrence, and the attacker's goals and capabilities. Then, we categorize the applications of adversarial attack and defense methods in the cyber security domain. Finally, we highlight some characteristics identified in recent research and discuss the impact of recent advancements in other adversarial learning domains on future research directions in the cyber security domain. This paper is the first to discuss the unique challenges of implementing end-to-end adversarial attacks in the cyber security domain, map them in a unified taxonomy, and use the taxonomy to highlight future research directions.

One of the challenging aspects of applying machine learning is the need to identify the algorithms that will perform best for a given dataset. This process can be difficult, time consuming and often requires a great deal of domain knowledge. We present Sommelier, an expert system for recommending the machine learning algorithms that should be applied on a previously unseen dataset. Sommelier is based on word embedding representations of the domain knowledge extracted from a large corpus of academic publications. When presented with a new dataset and its problem description, Sommelier leverages a recommendation model trained on the word embedding representation to provide a ranked list of the most relevant algorithms to be used on the dataset. We demonstrate Sommelier's effectiveness by conducting an extensive evaluation on 121 publicly available datasets and 53 classification algorithms. The top algorithms recommended for each dataset by Sommelier were able to achieve on average 97.7% of the optimal accuracy of all surveyed algorithms.

Usually, image- and radar-based data are used to perform environmental characteristics related tasks in autonomous cars, while the use of valuable sensor data from the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus has been limited. The vehicle's CAN bus data consist of multivariate time series data, such as velocity, RPM, and acceleration, which contain meaningful information about the vehicle dynamics and environmental characteristics. The ability to use these data to sense the environment, along with the sight sense (from image-based data), can prevent a single point of failure when image- or radar-based data are missing or incomplete, and contribute to increased understanding of the vehicle's environment. Moreover, a solution that does not rely on image- or radar-based data also addresses concerns about privacy and the use of location-based data. We present DeepCAN, a novel hybrid method for road type classification that utilizes solely vehicle dynamics data and combines two main approaches for time series classification. In the end-to-end approach, a long short-term memory autoencoder (LSTM AE) is trained, and the learned embedding serves as the input to a fully convolutional network autoencoder (FCN AE), while the feature-based approach utilizes an XGBoost classifier with aggregated time series feature representation. In our comprehensive evaluation on two real-world datasets, we assessed the performance of each model component as an independent solution, as well as a model integrating all of the components in a hybrid solution. The results demonstrate DeepCAN's efficiency and accuracy and provide a solid basis for its future use by the automobile industry.

The task of a recommender system evaluation has often been addressed in the literature, however there exists no consensus regarding the best metrics to assess its performance. This research deals with collaborative filtering recommendation systems, and proposes a new approach for evaluating the quality of neighbor selection. It theorizes that good recommendations emerge from good selection of neighbors. Hence, measuring the quality of the neighborhood may be used to predict the recommendation success. Since user neighborhoods in recommender systems are often sparse and differ in their rating range, this paper designs a novel measure to asses a neighborhood quality. First it builds the realization based entropy (RBE), which presents the classical entropy measure from a different angle. Next it modifies the RBE and propose the realization based distance entropy (RBDE), which considers also continuous data. Using the RBDE, it finally develops the consent entropy, which takes into account the absence of rating data. The paper compares the proposed approach with common approaches from the literature, using several recommendation evaluation metrics. It presents offline experiments using the Netflix database. The experimental results confirm that consent entropy performs better than commonly used metrics, particularly with high sparsity neighborhoods. This research is supported by The Israel Science Foundation, Grant #1362/10. This research is supported by NHECD EC, Grant #218639.

In recent years, transfer learning has been used successfully to improve the predictive performance of collaborative filtering (CF) for sparse data by transferring patterns across domains. In this work, we advance transfer learning (TL) in recommendation systems (RSs), facilitating improvement within a domain rather than across domains. Specifically, we utilize TL for in-domain usage. This reduces the need to obtain information from additional domains, while achieving stronger single domain results than other state-of-the-art CF methods. We present two new algorithms; the first utilizes different event data within the same domain and boosts recommendations of the target event (e.g., the buy event), and the second algorithm transfers patterns from dense subspaces of the dataset to sparse subspaces. Experiments on real-life and publically available datasets reveal that the proposed methods outperform existing state-of-the-art CF methods.

Testing is an important part of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Availability of testing is a bottleneck due to constrained resources and effective prioritization of individuals is necessary. Here, we discuss the impact of different prioritization policies on COVID-19 patient discovery and the ability of governments and health organizations to use the results for effective decision making. We suggest a framework for testing that balances the maximal discovery of positive individuals with the need for population-based surveillance aimed at understanding disease spread and characteristics. This framework draws from similar approaches to prioritization in the domain of cyber-security based on ranking individuals using a risk score and then reserving a portion of the capacity for random sampling. This approach is an application of Multi-Armed-Bandits maximizing exploration/exploitation of the underlying distribution. We find that individuals can be ranked for effective testing using a few simple features, and that ranking them using such models we can capture 65% (CI: 64.7%-68.3%) of the positive individuals using less than 20% of the testing capacity or 92.1% (CI: 91.1%-93.2%) of positives individuals using 70% of the capacity, allowing reserving a significant portion of the tests for population studies. Our approach allows experts and decision-makers to tailor the resulting policies as needed allowing transparency into the ranking policy and the ability to understand the disease spread in the population and react quickly and in an informed manner.