text:
Fantastic Embeddings and How to Align Them: Zero-Shot Inference in a Multi-Shop Scenario
by Federico Bianchi, et al.
Università Bocconi
This paper addresses the challenge of leveraging multiple embedding spaces for multi-shop personalization, proving that zero-shot inference is possible by transferring shopping intent from one website to another without manual intervention. We detail a machine learning pipeline to train and optimize embeddings within shops first, and support the quantitative findings with additional qualitative insights. We then turn to the harder task of using learned embeddings across shops: if products from different shops live in the same vector space, user intent - as represented by regions in this space - can then be transferred in a zero-shot fashion across websites. We propose and benchmark unsupervised and supervised methods to "travel" between embedding spaces, each with its own assumptions on data quantity and quality. We show that zero-shot personalization is indeed possible at scale by testing the shared embedding space with two downstream tasks, event prediction and type-ahead suggestions. Finally, we curate a cross-shop anonymized embeddings dataset to foster an inclusive discussion of this important business scenario.
Federico Bianchi
Jacopo Tagliabue
Bingqing Yu
Luca Bigon
Ciro Greco
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Inspired by the similarity between words in sentences and products in browsing sessions, recent work in recommender systems re-adapted the NLP CBOW model (Mikolov et al., 2013a) to create product embeddings (Lake et al., 2019) , i.e. low-dimensional representations which can be used alone or fed to downstream neural architectures for other machine learning tasks. Product embeddings have been mostly investigated as static entities so far, but, exactly as words (Di Carlo et al., 2019) , products are all but static. Since the creation of embeddings is a stochastic process, training embeddings for similar products in different digital shops will produce embedding spaces which are not immediately comparable: how can we build a unified cross-shop representation of products? In this work, we present an end-to-end machine learning pipeline to solve the transfer learning challenge in digital commerce, together with substantial evidence that the proposed methods – even with no supervision – solve effectively industry problems that are otherwise hard to tackle in a principled way (e.g. zero-shot inference in a multi-shop scenario).
We summarize the main contributions of this paper as follows:
we extensively investigate product embeddings in both the within-shop and cross-shop scenarios. Since this is the first research work to tackle cross-shop inference by aligning embedding spaces, Section 2 explains the use cases at length. While within-shop training is not a novel topic per se (Section 3), we report detailed quantitative results since we could not
replicate previous findings in hyperparameter tuning; we also improve upon existing pipelines by proposing a qualitative validation as well;
we propose, implement and benchmark several aligning methods, varying the degree of supervision and data quality required. We provide quantitative and qualitative validation of the proposed methods for two downstream tasks: a "next event prediction" and a type-ahead personalization task, in which aligned embeddings are used as input to a conditional language model;
curate and release in the public domain a cross-shop product embeddings dataset111At the time of drafting this paper, discussions within the legal team of Coveo are still ongoing to settle on a final license for the data; as such, dataset details may change before final publication: feel free to reach out to us for any update. to foster reproducible research on this topic. With practitioners in the industry in mind, we also detail our cloud architecture in Appendix A.
Our analysis of product data from several stores found that product embeddings, while superficially similar to word embeddings, have their own peculiarities, and data assumptions need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, our benchmarks confirm that the proposed methodology is of great interest when a single SaaS provider can leverage cross-client data, or when a multi-brand/multi-regional group can use data from one store to improve performance on another.
2. Use cases from the industry
Shoppers are likely to browse in multiple related digital shops before making the final purchase decision, as most online shopping sessions (as high as 99% (Gudigantala et al., 2016) ) do not end with a transaction. The cross-shop scenario depicted in Fig. 1 is therefore very common: the shopper starts browsing on Shop A for basketball products and ends up continuing his session on Shop B.
Providing relevant content to unknown shoppers is of paramount importance to increase the probability of a conversion, considering that e-commerce websites tend to have high bounce rates (i.e. average percentage of users who leave after a single interaction with the page ranges between 25% and 40%
(SimilarWeb, 2019) ) and low ratios of recurring customers (¡9% in our dataset). Moreover, there is vast consensus in the industry on the importance of personalization (Schreiner et al., 2019) in boosting the quality of the shopping experience and increasing revenues: but how is it possible to personalize the experience of a user that has never been on the target site?
Figure 1. Cross-shop use case: a user browsing "basketball-related" products on Shop A and then continuing the session on Shop B with similar products.
Cross-shop use case.
The rationale for this research work is thus the importance of providing personalized experiences as early as possible and with as little user data as possible: generally speaking, we propose to leverage the aligned product embedding space to model shopper's intent during a session – if cross-shop browsing is, so to speak, a walk through the (aligned) product space, we can feed users's position to downstream neural systems to capture their shopping intent.
Group Rev. (M$) Brands Examples
TJX 41.717 7 HomeSense, Marshalls
Nike 39.117 4 Converse, Nike
Gap 16.383 9 Gap, Old Navy
VF 13.870 19 Eastpack, Napapijri
L Brands 12.914 3 Victoria Secret, Pink
Hanesbrands 6.966 29 Champion, Playtex
Table 1. A sample of multi-brand retailers from Fortune 500.
There are two types of players which would naturally benefit from cross-shop personalization. The first is retail groups who own and operate multiple brands and shops (e.g. Gap Inc owns and operates Gap, Old Navy, etc). To give an idea of the size of this market share, the combined revenues generated by Fortune 500 retail groups with these characteristics is more than 130 billion dollars (see Table 1). For these retailers, a portion of the user base consistently shops across different websites of the same group and it would be therefore beneficial to them to implement optimization strategies across multiple websites. Given the size of the market, it is easy to see how the implementation of successful personalization strategies across shops would translate into remarkable business value. At the same time, most of these groups are "traditional" retailers (as opposed to digitally native companies e.g. Amazon). Therefore, even if they would be benefiting the most from a unified view of their customers across different digital properties, in practice they are more likely to experience roadblocks related to technology. To this extent, the immediate value of the present work is to show for the first time that personalization across shops can be achieved even with minimal data tracking, no meta-data and no human intervention. The traditional nature of these retailers may also explain why cross-shop behavior is a niche use case in the research community, whose agenda is mostly set by tech companies – by publishing our findings we wish the community would join us in tackling this important use case.
The second type of players are multi-tenant SaaS providers who provide AI-based services. For these companies the main challenge is to scale quickly within the verticals and minimize the friction in deployment cycles: being able to leverage some kind of "network effect" to transfer knowledge from one client to another would certainly be a distinctive competitive advantage. Recently, AI SaaS providers for e-commerce have received great attention from venture capitalists. As an indication of the size of the market opportunity, only in 2019 and only in the space of AI-powered search and recommendations, we witnessed Algolia raising USD110M (Techcrunch, ) , Lucidworks raising USD100M (Techcrunch, ) and Coveo raising CAD227M (Techcrunch, ) . While a full cross-shop data strategy depends on many non-technical assumptions (see Section 4 for a discussion of legal constraints), it is important to realize that some multi-property retail groups turn to external providers for certain AI services. While our methods do not assume any common meta-data between target shops (e.g. the two shops can be even in different language), we expect our models to work better with catalogs that have significant "semantic overlap" (e.g. two shops selling sport apparel, Section 4).
We show several effective methods to achieve transfer learning across shops, each making different assumptions about data quantity and quality available. As discussed at length in Section 5, a distinguishing feature of this use case is that we make no assumption at all about catalog overlap (i.e. the shops involved can have 0 items in common), making it much more challenging that the typical (and well-studied) retargeting use case (i.e. a shopper sees ads on Site X for the same product she was viewing on Site Y). Our most interesting result is proving that even without any cross-shop data, personalization on the target shop can be achieved successfully in a pure zero-shot fashion. To showcase the possibilities opened up by cross-shop embeddings, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the aligned space tackling two prediction tasks, as depicted in Figure 2: if the system observes the behavior of a user on Shop A, can it predict what she is going to browse/type on Shop B? As we shall see, the answer is "yes" for both use cases.
Figure 2. Zero-shot prediction tasks can be solved by transferring shopper's intent to the target website leveraging aligned embeddings; in the first task, the system predicts product interactions on Shop B from user browsing products on Shop A; in the second task, products on Shop A are used to personalize type-ahead suggestion on Shop B – since the session is basketball-themed, we expect the system to promote (ceteris paribus) basketball queries.
Cross-shop prediction task.
3. Related work
The work sits at the intersection of several research topics.
Product Embeddings. Word2vec (Mikolov et al., 2013c) was introduced in 2013 as a neural method to generate vector representations of words based on co-occurrences; soon, the model was adapted to the product space, where it found immediate use in recommender systems (Grbovic et al., 2015) . (Vasile et al., 2018) introduced Meta-Prod2Vec: given our focus on cross-shop learning, we decided to not use product information as there is no guarantee that two shops will have comparable metadata. (Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018) first studied the role of hyperparameters in recommendation quality: we extensively investigate hyperparameters as well, but we improve upon their validation procedure and add a qualitative evaluations of the embedding spaces.
Aligning Embedding Spaces. The problem of learning a mapping between spaces has been widely explored in NLP. In fact, Alignment is important for language translation (Lample et al., 2018; Artetxe et al., 2018) , to study language change (Bamman et al., 2014; Hamilton et al., 2016; Szymanski, 2017; Yao et al., 2018; Di Carlo et al., 2019) . However, as explained in Section 5, the availability of unequivocal pairs of matching items in two spaces (e.g. uno and one in language translation) make vector space alignment in NLP significantly different from our use case. (Bose et al., 2019) is a recent work on zero and few shots prediction in a recommender setting across multiple "spaces": their problem is phrased as a meta-learning task over graphs representing different cities, while our work is focused on behavioral-based embeddings and sessions across multiple spaces. Possibly because of the maturity of data ingestion required to rebuild session data and the difficulty in finding suitable datasets for experimentation, this work is the first to our knowledge to extensively study product embeddings across multiple spaces.
Deep Learning in Type-ahead Systems. Suggest-as-you-type is a well studied problem in the IR community (Cai and de Rijke, 2016) . Recent works have embraced neural networks: (Park and Chiba, 2017) introduces a char-based language model, (Wang and others, 2018) applies RNN to a noisy channel model (but the inner language model is not personalized like our proposed method). Specifically in e-commerce, (Kannadasan and Aslanyan, 2019) uses fastText to embed previous queries and then re-ranks suggestions accordingly: our personalization layer does not require linguistic resources or previous queries, as the vast majority of sessions (¿90% in our network) for mid-size shops do not contain search queries. (Yu et al., 2020) is the first exploration of cross-shop type-ahead systems, obtaining transfer learning by placing products in the same space through shared image features. The proposed prod2vec embeddings significantly outperform image-based representations to produce accurate conditional language models (18% MRR improvement over the same shop).
4. Dataset
Coveo is a Canadian SaaS provider of search and recommendation APIs with a global network of more than 500 customers, including several Fortune 500 companies. For this research, we leverage behavioral data collected over 12 months from two mid-size shops (revenues ¿10M and ¡100M) in the same vertical (sport apparel); we refer to them as Shop A and Shop B. Data is sessionized by the pipeline after ingestion: prod2vec embeddings are trained on product interactions that occur within each recorded shopper session (Section 5.1). In the interest of practitioners in the industry, we share details on our cloud design choices in Appendix A.
Catalogs from A and B
were also obtained to perform a qualitative check on our validation strategy and test semi-supervised approaches. After cleaning user sessions from bot-like behavior and sampling, descriptive statistics for the final product embedding dataset can be found in Table
2; even if A and B differ in catalog size and traffic, they have ¡9% of recurring customers (i.e. shoppers with more than 3 sessions in 12 months).
Sessions (events) SKUs 25/50/75 pct
3M (10M) 23k 3, 5, 7
11M (32M) 42k 3, 5, 7
Table 2. Descriptive stats for Shop A and Shop B
We believe it is important to explicitly address two potential legal concerns about the underlying dataset of this research:
end-user privacy: data collected is fully anonymized, in line with GDPR adequacy; data tracking required to produce aligned embeddings is significantly less than other standard e-commerce use cases (e.g. re-targeting);
data ownership: the possibility to use aggregate (embeddings-based) data across websites depends on case-by-case legal constraints and specific contractual clauses. Websites operated by the same group have generally no issue in sharing data to improve overall performance. On the other hand, websites operate by different companies may see each other as competitors. In our experience, the answer is not clear-cut: mid-size shops (like A and B) tend to be less protective and more focused on the upside of a system that is aware of industry trends; bigger players, on the other side, seem to be more defensive; interestingly, the latter are more likely to have multi-brand deployment, making the methods here developed still relevant for many use cases.
Finally, a sample of browsing sessions for distinct users with cross-shop behavior was obtained to benchmark different methods on the downstream prediction tasks: it is worth remembering that several proposed methods for cross-shop inference (Section 5) do not rely on cross-shop data, which is used in the unsupervised and semi-supervised case as gold standard only.
5. Methods
The cross-shop inference is built in two phases. First, the system learns the best embeddings for A and B separately, second, it learns a mapping function from one space to the other, implicitly aligning the two embedding spaces and enabling cross-shop predictions.
5.1. Learning optimal product embeddings
Product embeddings are trained using CBOW with negative sampling (Mikolov et al., 2013c, a) , by swapping the concept of words in a sentence with products in a browsing session; for completeness we report a standard formulation (Mu et al., 2018) . For each product p∈P, its center-product embedding and context-product embedding are d-dimensional vectors in R, U[p] and V[p]: embeddings are learned by solving the following optimization problem:
(1) \footnotesizemaxU:P→RdV:P→Rd∑(p,c)∈D+logσ(U[p]⊤V[c])+∑(p,c)∈D−logσ(−U[p]⊤V[c])
where D+/D− are positive/negative pairs in D, and σ(⋅)
is the standard sigmoid function. Following the findings in
(Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018) , we performed extensive tuning on the most important hyperparameters (Table 3) and develop both quantitative and qualitative protocols to evaluate the quality of the produced embedding space.
Gensim Parameter
Tested Values
min_count
2, 3, 5, 10, 15, 30
ns_exponent
-1.0, -0.5, 0.0, 0.75, 1.0
Table 3. Hyperparameters and their ranges.
5.1.1. Quantitative validation
We focused on a Next Event Prediction (NEP) task to evaluate quantitatively the quality of the embeddings: given a session s made by events e1, … en, how well e1, … en−1 can predict en?
To address the NEP, we propose to use the entire session preceding the target event, by constructing a session vector averaging the embeddings for e1, … en−1 and then apply a Nearest Neighborsclassifier to predict en. Our choice is in contrast with what proposed by (Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018)
, which conducts hyperparameter tuning using kNN with just one item,
en−1, as seed: from our experience in digital commerce, buying preferences are indeed multi-faceted, and important information about user intentions may be hidden at the start of the session ( (Covington et al., 2016; Yu et al., 2020) )222We also used LSTM as an alternative algorithm for validation, with similar results. We opted to report only kNN since a simpler model allows our valuation to be focused on the quality of the embeddings themselves, not so much the algorithm.. Both H@10 and NDCG@10 were calculated for each trained model, but NDCG@10 was primarily used for evaluation:
(2) Discounted CGk=DCGk=k∑i=1rating(i)log2(i+1)
(3) Ideal DCGk=IDCGk=|REL|∑i=1rating(i)log2(i+1)
(4) NDCGk=DCGkIDCGk
where |REL| is the list of ground truth target events, up to k, and rating(i) is the binary relevance value, which means rating(i)=1 if event i is found in the ground truth target events; otherwise, rating(i)=0. Best and worst models, with parameters and score, can be found in Table 4. It is interesting to remark that our extensive validation could not confirm many generalizations put forward in (Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018) : negative exponent was not found to be a consistent factor in improving embeddings quality and Shop A and Shop B best parameter combinations are very similar, despite the underlying distribution being different (Figure 3); moreover, the gap between best and worst models was found to be significant, but not as wide as (Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018) indicated.
Figure 3. Shop A (left) and Shop B (right) log plots for product views: empirical distribution is in blue, power-law in red and truncated power-law in green. Truncated power-law is a better fit than standard power-law for both shops (p<.05), with α=2.32 for A and α=2.72 for B. Power-law analysis and plots are made with (Alstott et al., 2014) .
Model Min Count Window Iter. Exp. NDCG@10
A - Best 15 10 30 0.75 0.1490
A - Worst 2 15 10 -0.5 0.1058
B - Best 15 5 30 0.75 0.2452
B - Worst 5 10 30 -0.5 0.1881
Table 4. Best and worst parameter settings by shop, with validation score.
5.1.2. Qualitative validation
The evaluation of word embedding models is intrinsically built on human-curated analogies such as boy : king = women : ? (Pennington et al., 2014) as both a quantitative check ("how many analogies can be solved by the vector algebra in the given space?") and a qualitative one ("can we confirm, as humans, that the semantic properties captured by the space are indeed close to our linguistic intuitions?"). While analogies are indeed potentially meaningful in the product spaces for specific use cases (e.g. what is the Nike's "air jordan shoes" equivalent for Adidas?), compiling a list for validation would be time-consuming and involving arbitrary choices.
To have an independent qualitative confirmation that the NEP task is enforcing meaningful distinctions between spaces trained with different parameters, we sampled a model from the top 5 and one from bottom 5 in the NEP ranking, and leverage domain experts to classify products into sport activities (soccer, basketball, tennis, etc., for a total of N=10 activities). We use t-sne (Maaten and Hinton, 2008) to project embeddings into two-dimensions and color-code the products with labels: as shown in Figure 4
, better embeddings form sharper clusters with homogeneous coloring. To confirm the visual results, we train a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with the objective of predicting the activity from the embeddings
333The MLP has two dense layers with relu
activation, a softmax layer for prediction,
dropout of 0.5 between layers, SGD as optimizer.. Confirming the visual inspection, the accuracy score was 0.95 for the high-performing model and 0.32 for the low-performing one.
Figure 4. 2-dimensional projections (t-sne) of high-scoring (left) and low-scoring (right) models according to the NEP task. Each point is a product in Shop A embedding space, color-coded by sport activity through catalog meta-data: it is easy to notice that high-scoring models produce sharper clusters in the embedding space. Projections are obtained with following parameters: perplexity=25, learning rate=10, iterations=500.
5.2. Crossing the (shop) chasm
Cross-embedding learning in the NLP space takes place in a continuum of supervision: from thousands of "true" pairs (Mikolov et al., 2013b) , to dozen of them (Artetxe et al., 2017) , to no pair at all (Lample et al., 2018) . However, it should be emphasized that aligning word spaces and aligning product spaces are not the same task:
given two languages, both will contain the same "semantic regions" (e.g., general topics like places, animals, numerals, etc.) and, within those regions, several overlapping tokens (e.g. dog is cane in Italian, one is uno, lake is lago, etc.); however, given even shops in the same vertical such as Shop A and Shop B, there is no guarantee they will both contain products for, say, climbing;
given two languages, there are linguistic resources mapping items from one to the other non-arbitrarily; however, given shops in the same verticals, finding exact duplicates is non-trivial and there are many cases in which mapping is arguably undetermined.
It is also important to stress that no product is assumed to be the same across the two shops: while we know Shop A and Shop B have comparable catalogs in terms of type of items (e.g. they both sell sneakers, boots, etc.), we make no assumption about them having the same tokens (i.e. we don't know if they both sell a specific pair of shoes, Air Zoom 95), and we make no use of textual meta-data.444Assuming user and/or attribute overlap is the typical setting for cross-domain recommender systems (Fernández-Tobías et al., 2012) : for this reason, they are not a meaningful baseline for the scope of this work..
Considering those differences, we built and tested a wide range of unsupervised and supervised models to address the cross-shop challenge:
image-based model (IM), a completely unsupervised model using weak similarity signals derived from image vectors to build a "noisy" seed for a self-learning framework (Artetxe et al., 2018) . In particular, we sample images from Shop A and Shop B full catalogs and run through a pre-trained VGG-16 network (Simonyan and Zisserman, 2015) to extract features from the fc2 layer; PCA is then applied to reduce the feature dimensions from 4096 to d
dimensions; K-means is then used to group the vectors for
Shop A into k clusters: 2 points closest to the centroids of each cluster are the "sample points"; for each of these points, we use kNN to retrieve the closest image from Shop B. The seed dictionary built in this fashion is used to bootstrap the self-learning framework, and iteratively improve the mapping and the dictionary until convergence. It is worth noting that the alignment results reported below are achieved even if the seed dictionary is indeed noisy (as verified manually by sampling the quality of the pairings), witnessing the robustness of the proposed procedure. Different values for d (5, 10, 20, 40, 60, 100) and k (15, 30, 50, 70) were tested, but we report the scores for the best combination (d=20 and k=50). This method is both completely unsupervised and fully "zero-shot" in the cross-shop scenario, as no data on cross-shop sessions is ever showed to the model during training;
user-based model (UM), a fully supervised model leveraging directly
users browsing on the two target shops. In particular, given the last product seen on the source shop and the first on the target shop, we learn to map the two products using linear regression that is then generalized to map all the embeddings of the source shop to the target shop.
user-translation model (TM), a fully supervised model that is using directly shoppers browsing on the two target shops as if it was a bi-lingual parallel corpus. In particular, task is modelled after a different NLP architecture, sequence-to-sequence networks for machine translation (Sutskever et al., 2014) : the intuition is that Shop A and Shop B behave quite literally as different languages and deep neural nets are well suited to learn how to encode in one space and decode in the other the latent intent of the shopper. We use the sequence to sequence model provided by the OpenNMT tool (Klein et al., 2017) that comes with 2-layer LSTM with 500 hidden units on both the encoder and the decoder layer. We initialize the embeddings of the layers using our product embeddings. The model is trained to translate the sequence of products seen in Shop A into a sequence of product seen in Shop B.
By proposing and testing methods with different degrees of supervision, we provide substantial evidence that aligning embedding is possible in a variety of business scenarios: in particular, insofar as data tracking and technological capabilities vary across retailers, purely unsupervised methods (IM) are particularly interesting as they make almost no assumption about available data and existing cross-shop data points. On the other hand, supervised models (TM) provide "natural" upper bounds for unsupervised counterparts, and can be deployed in business contexts where advanced data ingestion and data practices are already present. In general, our own experience is that these models can satisfy complementary business scenarios: for example, if historical fine-grained data is unavailable at day one (as it often is), aligning product embeddings with no cross-shop data is crucial to deliver personalization without advanced tracking capabilities.
6. Experiments
We apply alignment methods to two downstream tasks: the first one is a straightforward extension to two shops of NEP, as presented in Section 5.1 – by aligning different product spaces, we hope to prove we can reliably guess shopper interactions with products on the target shop by transferring her intent from the first shop; the second task is an NLP-related task, in which aligned embeddings are used to build a conditional language model that can provide personalized suggestions to shoppers arriving at the target site (Tagliabue et al., 2020) : the query suggestion task is useful both to establish that prod2vec transfer learning is superior to the image-based one (Yu et al., 2020) , and to prove that intent vectors are not just useful for recommendations, but also for a variety of personalization tasks in NLP.
It is important to highlight that our focus is to establish for the first time that aligning product embeddings allow to transfer shopper intent between shops in scalable and effective ways; for this reason, we picked architectures which are straightforward to understand, in order to make sure the variation in the results are due to the quality of the learned embeddings and not to the implementation of the downstream task models – while more sophisticated options are detailed in Section 7, our benchmarks show that aligned embeddings are indeed an extremely promising area of exploration.
Finally, it is important to stress that given the novelty of the setting (as discussed in Section 2) and the differences with cross-space tasks in NLP settings, prima facie plausible baselines are actually not good candidates for the scenarios at hand. For example, even in the presence of high-quality cross-shop tracking, joint embeddings cannot be trained on cross-shop sessions due to data sparsity; as another example, recent alignment techniques that are successful for word spaces (e.g. (Di Carlo et al., 2019) ) rely on the assumption that either many labeled pairs are available, or that the vast majority of the embedding space is comprised by pairs of identical items; other interesting ideas, such as using product titles for a similarity metrics, would require uniformity in meta-data, which is an assumption that no proposed models make. Framed as a zero-shot inference, multi-shop predictions are a relatively new challenge and we hope our work (and dataset) to be a long-lasting contribution to the community.
6.1. Next Event Prediction across shops
For the cross-shop prediction task, we sampled 12510 browsing sessions over a month (not included in the training set) for distinct users that visited Shop A and Shop B within the same day.
6.1.1. Quantitative evaluation
We benchmark the cross-shop methods from Section 5.2 against three baselines of increasing sophistication:
popularity model
(PM): while trivial to implement, leveraging product popularity is by far the most common heuristic in the industry for the zero-shot scenario, and it has been proven to be surprisingly competitive in many e-commerce settings against statistical and neural approaches
(Dacrema et al., 2019) ; also, given that popular products are more likely to be on display and generate a classic "rich get richer dynamics", quantitative results for PM are likely to overestimate its efficacy and therefore raising the bar for other methods;
activity-based model (AM): a semi-supervised model, inspired by evidence from NLP literature in which some supervision goes a long way in helping with the alignment process (Artetxe et al., 2017) ; in particular, the model leverages domain knowledge (sport activity for each product) that is however not directly related to the mapping we are trying to learn. We randomly sample 20 products from Shop A of category S and from Shop B within the same category, using activities as "known similar regions", and we then we learn a mapping function using standard linear regression from the centroid of the sampled products from the two spaces;
iterative alignment model (NM): state-of-the-art unsupervised method from (Artetxe et al., 2018) , originated in the NLP literature: the model is quite sophisticated and its performances in this scenario shed interesting insights on how peculiar the task of aligning product embeddings is (as compared to word embeddings); in a nutshell, NM leverages the structure of embedding spaces to build an initial weak dictionary; the dictionary is then used to bootstrap a self-learning process, which iterates through mapping and dictionary optimization, until convergence is reached.
Type FIP AIP
Unsupervised 0.00232 0.00297
Semi-supervised 0.00108 0.00121
Supervised 0.02741 0.02854
Table 5. NDCG@10 for supervised and unsupervised models in the First Item Prediction (FIP) and Any Item Prediction (AIP) tasks: best results per type are highlighted in bold.
Table 5 reports NDCG@10 for all models for two prediction tasks: First Item Prediction (FIP) and Any Item Prediction (AIP). FIP is the ability of the proposed model to guess the first product in the target shop, while AIP is the ability to guess any product found in the session in the target shop. Unsurprisingly, fully supervised models outperform all other methods; among unsupervised models, the IM model we propose is the best one, resulting in a 549% increase over the industry baseline and even significantly beating the semi-supervised baseline AM555Generally speaking, AM seems to overfit on common categories and turns out to be worse than the simple PM model.; the performance gap between IM and NM highlights that straightforward implementation of SOTA models from NLP does not guarantee the same results in the product scenario. Among supervised models, TM outperforms UM on FIP and provides a 1530% increase over the industry baseline; to test if TM improves significantly with data quantity, we ran an additional test on a separate cross-shop dataset from our network of clients: TM results on this second set for FIP/AIP are 0.066/0.071, and 0.021/0.023 for UM, showing that indeed the seq2seq architecture may be the best option for use cases in which significant amount of cross-shop behavior has been tracked already.
In the spirit of ablation studies, we generated predictions on the same cross-shop dataset using IM but employing instead low-scoring embedding spaces, to assess whether picking optimized vs non-optimized spaces make a difference in the zero-shot prediction task: the reported NDCG@10 for this setting is 0.005, which is significantly lower than the reported best score obtained with the optimized embeddings.
6.1.2. Qualitative evaluation
Given the novelty of the experimental settings, a qualitative evaluation is important as well to interpret the outcome of the benchmarks above: is the alignment of the two spaces capturing important human-level concepts? We devised two additional tests to answer these questions. First, we test the aligned embeddings in a "cross-shop activity prediction" task: using the same setup from Section 5.1.2, we train an MLP on Shop A aligned embeddings and use it without additional training on Shop B aligned embeddings. The mean accuracy for activity prediction over 5 runs is μ=0.73 (SD=0.002), confirming that the alignment process can effectively transfer learning from A to B.
Second, we perform error analysis on several misclassified cases. Our exploration highlights that pure quantitative measures - such as NDCG@10 - are great at capturing high-level patterns of efficacy for the chosen models, but cannot capture important differences in particular cases of cross-shop predictions. If we think about the particular task of zero-shot recommendation, NDCG@K is asking the model to pick the one correct product out of several thousands, which is likely to underestimate the practical efficacy of the proposed recommendations. Instead of just computing an hit/miss ratio for NDCG@K, we ran the IM model on the test set recording, for every "miss", the distance in the shared embedding space between the target product and the predicted one; we then order these wrong predictions according to the magnitude of the error, and analyze sessions from the top and bottom of the distribution. Interestingly enough, sessions with a small recorded error are the ones that looks coherent to a human observer, as in Session A in Figure 6, where running shoes from Brooks manufacturer are confused by the model with running shoes from Mizuno manufacturer; when error margin gets big, situations like Session B are more common: products in the same cross-shop session are very different, since the shopper intent may have drifted between the two visits - the prediction of the model is significantly off (wrong object, wrong manufacturer, wrong sport activity). To try and quantify the proportion of "reasonable" mistakes, we train an MLP mapping the target and the predicted product to a sport activity (as in Section 5.1.2), and comparing the first predicted activity versus the ground truth: this model achieves zero-shot accuracy of 0.44, which raises to 0.66 if we consider just sessions whose error distance is below the median (i.e. sessions with more "stable" intent).
All combined, these findings suggest that models are successfully transferring shopping intent and they are likely to perform well in practice for all the sessions in which intent across shop is consistent, even when the predicted item is not exactly a match (e.g. Session A in Figure 6; cases like Session B are unlikely to be solvable anyway).
Figure 5. Landing pages can be customized in real-time by transferring intent from previous shops to the current one: by focusing on the general activity, instead than the exact product, we make the task easier for the model and unlock more use cases for the clients. In this example, Shop B presents a basketball-themed page to User A and a tennis-themed page to User B.
Pipeline functional overview.
Figure 6. Two sample sessions from the cross-shop portion of the dataset: Session A is a session with stable shopping intent (i.e. "running") and model prediction is wrong but plausible; Session B is made of two disconnected intents and model prediction is significantly wrong.
6.2. Personalized Type-Ahead across shops
As a second, less direct application of aligned embedding spaces, we propose to exploit product embeddings in a conditional language model, to provide personalized type-ahead suggestion to incoming users on a target shop (Fig. 2). We deploy the same type-ahead framework we proposed in (Yu et al., 2020) , in which an encoder-decoder architecture is employed to first encode user intent, and then use an LSTM-powered char-based language model to sort query completions by their probability (please refer to the paper for architectural details): as illustrated by Fig. 7, if the user's session is basketball-themed (1), we expect completions like basketball jersey for prefix b; if it is tennis-themed (2), the same prefix may instead trigger a tennis brand like babolat.
Figure 7. Two sessions illustrating cross-shop personalization for type-ahead suggestions: the same prefix "b" on the target website triggers different completion depending on intent transferred from the source shop.
Example of cross-shop personalization for type-ahead suggestions.
Table 6 shows the results of our quantitative benchmarks for the cross-shop scenario, comparing a non-personalized baseline to models performing transfer learning. For the personalized predictions, we train a conditional language models on the target shop first. At prediction time, we feed to the target shop model the aligned embeddings from the source shop, perform average pooling in the encoder (Yu et al., 2020) , and read off the decoder conditional probabilities of the target query suggestions.
We use Mean reciprocal rank (MRR) as our main metric, as a standard in the auto-completion literature: MRR@k is MRR measured by retrieving from the model the first k suggestions. In our experiments, k is set to 5 to mimic the target production environment:
(5) MRR=1|Q||Q|∑i=11ranki
where ranki is the position of the first relevant result in the i-th query and Q is the total number of queries.
The best supervised models provide up to 600% uplift, but even the purely unsupervised model significantly outperforms the non-personalized model, establishing that transferring intent is significantly better than treating all incoming shoppers as new; for mid-size and large retailers, capturing the interest of even a small percentage of these users may provide significant business benefits.
SL=0 SL=1
Vec2Seq+IM
Vec2Seq+UM
Vec2Seq+TM
Table 6. MRR@5 in the cross-shop scenario, for different seed length (SL), for shoppers going from A to B and issuing a query there.
Quantitative benchmarks provide empirical evidence on the overall efficiency of personalization, but as discussed, cross-shop sessions "in the wild" sometime show drifting intent across sites. To specifically test how much the transferred intent is able to capture semantic similarity across the two aligned spaces, we devise a small user study. We recruited 20 native speakers, whose age ranged between 22 and 45; subjects (Figure 8) were presented with a product image from S-Shop (1), a seed character (2) and were asked to pick the most relevant completion among 5 candidates (3). The ¡product image, seed¿ pairs are taken from representative queries from the cross-shop set, for a total of 30 stimuli for each subject; five candidate queries are chosen by first retrieving the top 35 candidates from the unconditioned model, and then sampling without replacement. By collecting semantic judgment directly, our prediction is that the performance gain from personalization will be higher, since the study should eliminate the popularity bias implicit in search logs.
Figure 8. Example of a stimulus in the qualitative user study.
Example of the relevance task for qualitative evaluation.
PM, IM and TM are tested against the collected dataset, resulting in a MRR@5 of, respectively, 0.076, 0.123 and 0.138; TM accuracy with SL=1 is 81% higher than PM, supporting our hypothesis that the aligned embeddings successfully transfer user intent in the zero-shot scenario.
7. (Vector) Space, the final frontier: what's next?
In this work we detailed a machine learning pipeline for behavioral data ingestion finalized to train prod2vec models, i.e. generate neural product representations for several downstream prediction tasks. In the first part, we focused on training the best embeddings as judged by quantitative and qualitative validation. Product representations have been found to be increasingly useful in many e-commerce scenarios (Tagliabue et al., 2020) , but the understanding of them in realistic industry scenarios is still incomplete; on this point, it is telling that several findings of a recent hyperparameter study ( (Caselles-Dupré et al., 2018) ) could not be replicated in our context. For this reason, we believe that the within-shop training portion of our pipeline can provide a useful assessment for production systems in the industry, starting from our validation best practices and engineering considerations. Prompted by the industry need for few-shots and scalable personalization and practical deployment concern of our growing client network, the second part of this work was focused on generalizing product spaces to address the cross-shop scenario depicted in Fig. 2. We devised and tested several models with varying degrees of supervisions, and, again, supplemented our quantitative benchmarks with additional qualitative tasks to gain a better understanding of model performances in this new scenario. All in all, the evidence provided is a strong argument in favor of our initial research hypothesis, i.e. that embedding spaces from two shops can be successfully aligned, so that zero-shot predictions can be performed in a principled way.
While the theoretical and engineering foundations of the platform have proven to be solid and crucial in solving retail problems at scale, our roadmap is focused on taking these ideas even further. Broadly speaking, we can classify open issues in two categories, research and product improvements:
research: since i) there is independent demand for general purpose prod2vec models, ii) universal tracking is still available in a limited fashion, we did not test end-to-end learning by using cross-shop predictions as the optimization task directly; as more data becomes available, it is a natural extension to the methods proposed in this work. Moreover, as highlighted in Section 6, significant optimization can be made to neural architectures for downstream tasks now that this study first established the viability of aligned embeddings to capture user's intent across shops;
product: as discussed in Section 2, online retailers are facing increasing pressure to deliver relevant experiences to incoming customers; the question is not whether personalization should be done, but how soon into the shopper journey it can be done. We are actively working with several fashion groups to deploy cross-shop models and perform live A/B testing of the proposed methods; in our growing SaaS network of retailers, we believe more and more global multi-shop opportunities will soon benefit at scale from our research.
On a final note, we hope that curating the first dataset of its kind will help drawing increasing attention from industry and academic practitioners to these important business scenarios. SaaS providers with an extensive network of clients are ideally suited to leverage transfer learning techniques, including the alignment of embeddings here introduced; at the same time, some of the biggest traditional retailers in the world are indeed multi-brand groups, and they could "transfer knowledge" between their brands to provide personalization in an hyper-competitive, data-driven market.
In a time characterized by growing concerns on long-term storage of personal data (Voigt and Bussche, 2017) , we do believe that small-data learning will be a distinctive feature for successful players in this space.
Acknowledgements.
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and Piero Molino for comments on previous versions of this work. Thanks to Caterina Caterí Vernieri, who brought LaTeX magic and stellar T-factor into our paper and our lives (not in this order). Special thanks to Andrea Polonioli for his support.
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Appendix A Data Pipeline With Paas Services
For practitioners in the same industry, Figure 9 gives a high-level sketch of how the chosen PaaS services fit together in the pipeline:
Figure 9. Cloud-based data ingestion pipeline.
the Javascript library is stored on S3 and globally distributed through AWS CloudFront666https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/;
the pixel endpoint is reachable through AWS CloudFront, to ensure high performances;
incoming events are processed by an AWS Lambda@Edge777https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/edge/ and streamed to internal consumers by using AWS Kinesis888https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/;
AWS Firehose999https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-firehose/ is used to persist all the RAW events in S3101010https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ for future re-processing;
the ETL processing is done in an AWS EMR111111https://aws.amazon.com/emr/ Cluster; normalized and sessionized events are then stored on S3 in a Parquet format;
tables metadata are stored in AWS Glue Data Catalog121212https://aws.amazon.com/glue/; data are made querable with Spark-SQL on EMR and AWS Athena131313https://aws.amazon.com/athena/.
data are also stored in Snowflake141414https://www.snowflake.com/ as part of our project for a future simplification of our data warehouse practices.


text:
Caffeine and Gasoline
Evolution of the American Rocker
About the Movie
Through the lens of fatherhood
Posted on November 3, 2017 September 25, 2019 by admin
From: Rust is Gold Antiques Blog
Writer: Thaison Garcia
I jokingly tell people, being a man is a matter of age, and being a gentleman is a matter of choice. I think the same role can be applied to fatherhood. There comes a point in every mans life that he has to decide if he is fit to be a true father, someone who is willing to give up every selfish need and want for the ones they love. A father takes that leap of faith to become their child's strength when they are weak, their hero when they need hope, their rock – their everything.
Perhaps I think too much about what an ideal father should look like but I've often contemplated whether or not I would make a decent father myself. I was not raised by my father nor was he by his, so my family track record isn't exactly ideal for fatherhood. That hasn't stopped my mind from wondering how my own life would've been, maybe completely different, had I decided to become a father myself.
There is something very special and unique that takes place when a father is doing his job perfectly – he becomes a coach and a teacher all in one. I recall observing this a few years back when my friend Steven Maes was mentoring his daughter, as she photographed a few of the Duke City Rockers for Steve's documentary – Caffeine and Gasoline. I had known him from building and riding cafe racers and his work in the film industry. I also knew Steve was a father to two girls, Kayleigh and Ashleigh, but I had never seen him in that role until that day of the photo-shoot for his film.
Steve's forthcoming documentary – Caffeine & Gasoline: Evolution of the American Rocker
It was a hot summer day in downtown Albuquerque and we staged our bikes behind the Launchpad Bar. The sun was sweltering, and we were melting in our Levi's and black leather jackets. Steve's eldest daughter Kayleigh conducted most of the shoot as he watched and directed her through the process. The whole thing took a little over two hours, and the two worked in perfect harmony – like a master and apprentice. Over my eleven years as a teacher I have estimated that I have taught around 1500 kids from every age and background, and I know how quickly a kid can go from happy-go-lucky to completely irritated. Now, add twenty "Rockers", 90° heat to the mix and you could guess how any teenager would act. I personally wasn't expecting Kayleigh and Steve to keep their composure, but they did just that on this day. Steve sat back from a distance and Kayleigh managed the entire shoot like a seasoned pro.
Not surprisingly, to this day Steve's own father Ben is still his hero and it's obvious to see why he takes his role as a father seriously. Steve's earliest memory of his father, was their time spent in northern Nevada on snowmobiles flying through the snow as he held onto his father for dear life. He remembers thinking that his father was the coolest guy around, a regular Steve McQueen. His dad was an outdoorsman that loved everything from hunting and fishing to hiking in the mountains. Ben was also into wrenching on muscle cars, as he was a huge fan of Detroit muscle from the 60's and 70's. On occasion he would pick Steve up from school in his '68 Pontiac GTO.
Steve recalls that he loved it when they went out in that thing, burning tires and hearing that big motor rumble. His dad was also a great teacher and mentor, as he loved showing Steve all aspects of everything he did. His dad worked with his hands, as a welder and ironworker and he was always making things. Steve remembers something that has always stuck with him, "My dad was always welding some kind of contraption or fabricating some kind of thing for the house and loved showing me how he made these things." Steve's grandfather was also a do-it-yourself kind of man, that worked as a carpenter in Los Alamos during World War II splitting time between his home in northern New Mexico – a small ranch where they raised animals and made everything they needed.
Ben's 1968 Pontiac GTO
When Steve's father was old enough he left the ranch for Ely, Nevada and was soon drafted into the army during the Vietnam conflict. He eventually returned and married Steve's mother Lucille, settling and raising a family in northern Nevada. The family then moved when Steve was 11, as the company that his dad worked for shut down and the family moved to another location with the same company in Silver City, New Mexico. It would be an interesting move for Steve, as he had grown up in a very small town in northern Nevada with gambling and interesting people. He recalls that one end of Ely had a "red light" district and every gas station had a slot machine. He also remembers as a kid pulling into Silver City, in the middle of July, and seeing a couple guys walking down the street wearing beanies and flannels and thinking the only time they wore beanies and flannels in Nevada was for hunting in the mountains.
This was his first exposure to latino Cholo culture, and like most transplants to New Mexico it would take him awhile to relate to the cultural difference between northern Nevada and New Mexico. Even though he was raised in a mostly Hispanic environment, Ely was very multi-cultural and he could not relate to Silver City's large Hispanic population immediately – it took him a minute to adjust and Steve's dad had started to recognize it. As a result he felt that it would be important for his son to be able to defend himself, so he put him in boxing that summer before school started, as he was now eleven and would need to become a little tougher.
Luckily, the first group of tough kids he met was in the boxing gym which was located in an old courthouse. The gym was comprised of a group of the local "chicano" kids that he quickly became friends with. This would later be a benefit as he soon found out when school started. He remembers getting picked on by a couple of older kids after school one day when one of the kids from the boxing gym stepped in – he told the bullies that they did not want to mess with Steve as he was a friend of theirs.
Ben and Steve – Hunting the Nevada mountains
Steve recalls that, "Silver City during the eighties was still segregated in someways, in the sense that there was a large ranching community, and you had ranchers kids that were predominantly white, you had the Hispanic kids and you had what we all call jocks, then there was the rockers who were kind of the "metal kids". "They all hung out in their own little cliques, and I think because I grew up in northern Nevada, a more culturally integrated environment, I didn't really identify with anybody. I had friends in each of those groups because I was an athlete that ran track and played baseball, football, and soccer and I related to the Chicano kids because I grew up Hispanic but I had friends who were ranchers or "Cowboys" because I hunted and fished and liked the outdoors."
Steve's main passion though was his guitar, and like many other adolescents of that time he dreamed of playing in a rock band. He graduated from high school in 1987 and attended his first year of college at Western New Mexico University. The small town would not quench his thirst though as he decided to move to Albuquerque and attend the University of New Mexico. He tried to put several bands together and write music but unfortunately it had started to eat into his academics. He had a difficult choice to make, stick it out in New Mexico or chase his dreams of becoming a musician. He did what most ambitious kids would do and decided to drop out and give his dreams of writing and performing music a chance. Surprisingly his father and mother would be very supportive of his choice and encourage him every step of the way.
Without a friend or any connections in California, Steve packed his bags and what little money he had and headed for Los Angeles. Like so many others before and after him, he would come to find out that LA and the business had a way of breaking your spirit. However, after several years of hard work, he stuck it out and had found a pretty decent group of musicians that he could play with. They eventually recorded a demo album and Steve was starting to learn the ins and outs of the business – from recording to producing. He also made many humbling trips to record labels trying to get a deal, including labels such as Warner Bros and Capitol Records hoping to sign a contract.
However, the year was 1993 and he didn't get much interest in that his style of New Wave or pop music had already passed and the grunge scene had just kicked in the door of the music industry – he was starting to learn to be flexible. His band eventually broke up and still determined he decided to pursue something as a solo artist and producer. He spent the next few years recording musicians and building a small studio in Albuquerque. He also tried to make a few connections and got some interest from Warner Bros but most of the labels just tossed around his music as they decided it wasn't relate-able on a grand scale. Not ready to throw in the towel, he spent his time trying to learn as much as he could about the entertainment industry, recording other artists, making connections and never giving up on his dreams.
Steve on stage
After several painful years of trying to break into the business he had realized that he liked to play and record music but found it to be much too difficult as a solo artist. As a solo act he constantly had to piece a makeshift band together for shows and recording. The years were quickly fading together as he had started to realize that maybe the "rockstar" life was not in the cards. The strain of staying in, and traveling to Hollywood was also taking its toll, good friends were getting into hard drugs and LA had overnight become too expensive to live. He felt drained like he had been in a bad relationship and thought that it was time to come back home for good. As the window on his music career had closed, a great big beautiful door would open to one of the best points of his life.
Soon after returning to New Mexico feeling somewhat defeated he quickly met the love of his life Kristee. She was tall and pretty and provided the calming nature that he needed. After a year of dating, Steve proposed and within two years of marriage they were surprised to find they were going to have a child. They named their first born daughter Kayleigh after one of Steve's favorite songs. He had also decided that it was probably time to go back to school, finish his degree and to figure out a career for himself to provide for his family. He graduated three years later from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelor's degree in Media Arts and Communications.
Everything had started to finally fall into place for Steve, with a young child and wife, he decided to put his multi media and music skills to use as he lined up a few graphic design and video production jobs for a few local companies in town. He also decided to try his hand at publishing by starting a music magazine which ran for several years in Albuquerque, showcasing local musicians and artists.
At that time New Mexico was experiencing an emerging movie industry. New Mexico's beautiful skies and desert landscapes had been home to the westerns of the 60's and 70's but it had never really been the mecca of the industry until the late 90's and early 2000's. At the time, New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson, had introduced incentives that had drawn a lot of Hollywood productions with bigger names to shoot in New Mexico and utilize the locations. Steve's "big break" would come when he was lucky enough to get on a film called The Flock with Richard Gere and Claire Danes. Steve's younger sister, JoAnna, who had been in the film industry already was not able to work on that film as she was working on a TV series called Wildfire. He interviewed for the graphic designer job, and as they say in this industry, the rest is history. He worked continually from that point on with several major television series and feature films. Today his name can been seen on everything from the Emmy winning Breaking Bad, the hugely popular In Plain Sight, to the Academy Award nominated In the Valley of Elah with Tommy Lee Jones and currently the long running Netflix series Longmire. Within the industry his name speaks volumes, but at home for his two daughters Kayleigh and Ashleigh, it's just plain old dad – and that's just fine with him.
Kristee, Ashleigh and Steve at the 2017 Art Director Guild Awards in Hollywood
As the years had flown by, and his success continued to grow, he found himself reflecting on his own father's lessons. He noticed early on that Kayleigh had a creative side, and was fascinated by visual things like photography and film, which allowed them to bond very closely. He would not push her to pursue a career in the industry, but would gently encourage her as she had a natural knack for cinematography. Now Kayleigh is pursuing her Bachelor of Arts Degree at the University of New Mexico like her father, and he continues to give her as much support as possible, as he knows she has the potential to be extremely creative and successful. From the few photo shoots I've been on with Steve and Kayleigh it is apparent that she trusts his instincts. She whole heartily believes that he would never steer her wrong and it's also obvious that she accepts criticism well from him.
It's not all rose gardens or new Mikuni Flat-slides for Steve, as he readily admits that having two daughters can be tough for a guy. Living in a house with three women can be tricky, "there's a lot of drama that goes on and there's a lot of emotions going on with hormones and such, but I think the thing you want as a father, is to educate your children in a way that they understand the world around them. To understand that it is a difficult place sometimes. You want to try and set them up with the tools to be happy, as long as they are true to themselves then the sky's the limit." As Steve looks back at his life, he probably thinks about how he never became that famous rockstar – embraced by millions of adoring fans. However, he did become a rockstar to three of the most beautiful gals in his life.
As I am finishing up this story on Steve during a long flight home from New York, I had some time to reflect on the friends that I have that are fathers. And to be honest they are some great and honorable men. I might be wrong but I believe deep down, there is a father in every man, a hero in their child's eyes. Not every man decides to be that hero in their child's life but that shouldn't diminish from the fact that there are some great men out there playing both mother and father. I see on a daily basis, hundreds of kids wanting, needing and wishing for a good father and it is heartbreaking. So when I write that I am proud of my friends that take on the challenge, I mean it with the deepest sincerity and when they look in the mirror, I hope they see a hero.
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text:
Subwavelength integrated photonics
Pavel Cheben1,
Robert Halir2,3,
Jens H. Schmid1,
Harry A. Atwater4 &
David R. Smith5
Nature volume 560, pages565–572(2018)Cite this article
Metamaterials
In the late nineteenth century, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated that the electromagnetic properties of materials are intimately related to their structure at the subwavelength scale by using wire grids with centimetre spacing to manipulate metre-long radio waves. More recently, the availability of nanometre-scale fabrication techniques has inspired scientists to investigate subwavelength-structured metamaterials with engineered optical properties at much shorter wavelengths, in the infrared and visible regions of the spectrum. Here we review how optical metamaterials are expected to enhance the performance of the next generation of integrated photonic devices, and explore some of the challenges encountered in the transition from concept demonstration to viable technology.
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Fig. 1: Light propagation through a periodic dielectric structure.
Fig. 2: Light propagation in a silicon waveguide with an SWG core.
Fig. 3: Subwavelength engineered waveguide devices for fibre-to-chip coupling, beam splitting and polarization splitting.
Fig. 4: A roadmap for integrated SWG metamaterial devices and systems.
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We are grateful to S. Janz, D.-X. Xu, A. Ortega-Moñux, Í. Molina-Fernández, J. G. Wangüemert-Pérez, J. Lapointe, J. Čtyroký, C. Alonso-Ramos, D. Benedikovic, G. Mashanovich, A. V. Velasco, W. Ye, M. L. Calvo, L. Vivien, Y. Grinberg, D. Melati and M. Dado for discussions. R.H. acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad (cofinanciado FEDER) Proyecto TEC2016-80718-R. H.A.A. acknowledges financial support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant number FA9550-16-1-0019.
National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Pavel Cheben & Jens H. Schmid
Universidad de Málaga, Departamento de Ingeniería de Comunicaciones, ETSI Telecomunicación, Málaga, Spain
Robert Halir
Bionand Center for Nanomedicine and Biotechnology, Málaga, Spain
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA
Harry A. Atwater
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
David R. Smith
Pavel Cheben
Jens H. Schmid
J.H.S., R.H., P.C. and H.A.A. wrote the manuscript. P.C. and D.R.S. contributed to its preparation.
Correspondence to Pavel Cheben.
The authors declare no competing interests.
Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cheben, P., Halir, R., Schmid, J.H. et al. Subwavelength integrated photonics. Nature 560, 565–572 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0421-7
Issue Date: 30 August 2018
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With my hectic schedule, I learned to keep myself always on the go with my laptop backpack to be revealed in this Moshi Helios Backpack Review. If you've got the same lifestyle as mine, you wouldn't think twice when you grab this charmer next time you go shopping.
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We are always touched and inspired by people who fundraise for Whiteleys Retreat. This includes some key events like The KILTWALK, Ladies Lunches, Charity Balls, Coffee Mornings, Yogathons, Hogmanay Hootenanny, Baking Events, Cycling and Running challenges, Mountain Treks around the World and so much more. We need your support in setting up more 3rd party Fundraising Events.
Come and join Whiteleys Warriors?
We will be signing up for cycling, running, trekking, hillwalking and walking challenges. Anything that involves mindfulness, fitness and just getting out there for some fun, fresh air while fundraising.
If you would be interested in running your own event to be a part of Whiteleys Community, get in touch!
The perfect environment for you and your family to enjoy a short, therapeutic break.


text:
syslog
======

Golang alternative for built-in log/syslog package

Differences with standard library
--------

The "log/syslog" package writes raw data directly into syslog socket.
The resulting log message will look like:

    Sep 18 10:28:52 server 2013-09-18T10:28:52Z server [programname][20310]: Log message

You see that server name and datetime are duplicated. The log message format is hardcoded into source,
thus you cannot omit data duplication.

Another major disadvantage is that resulting log message cannot be processed using tools such as rsyslog,
because it cannot obtain the name of the sender application.

The approach used in this library is calling C functions openlog and syslog directly.
It solves both problems mentioned above.

The library provides:
* Openlog, Syslog functions with parameters identical to those in syslog.h C header
* log/syslog-like functions for writing messages: Emerg, Alert, Crit etc.
* Their formatted versions: Emergf, Alertf, Critf etc.
* io.Writer interface

Restrictions
--------

Because of using C-strings for calling syslog functions, to omit memory leaks
when you call Openlog function the data from **ident** parameter is copied into
static char array with fixed length. Length of this array is defined in syslog_wrapper.h
and currently equals **1000**. If length if ident string exceeds it, then
it will be cut up to maximum value.

Example
--------

    import "github.com/blackjack/syslog"
    func main() {
        syslog.Openlog("awesome_app", syslog.LOG_PID, syslog.LOG_USER)
        syslog.Syslog(syslog.LOG_INFO, "Hello syslog!")
        syslog.Err("Sample error message")
        syslog.Critf("Sample %s crit message", "formatted")
    }

The resulting log message will look like:

    Sep 18 18:13:46 server awesome_app[16844]: Hello syslog!
    Sep 18 18:13:46 server awesome_app[16844]: Sample error message
    Sep 18 18:13:46 server awesome_app[16844]: Sample formatted crit message

Feel the difference!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Year of the Monkey! OOH OOH AH AH!
I made this back in 2006. I won 2nd place in Wonchop's contest!
Please can you make more MOTHER animations as it is MOTHER 3's 10th anniversary.
This Old cartoon still packs a wallop.
Have a Super Merry Christmas Newgrounds!! WOOOHOOOO!


Enuff Skateboards: Slick Willies Presents "City Slickers Skate Jam 2014"
Slick Willies Presents "City Slickers Skate Jam 2014"
Enuff are pleased to be supporting the City Slickers Skate Jam 2014, presented by Slick Willies Skate Shop.
With £1,500 of product prizes for the skate jam as well as cash prizes for best tricks on the day, it's not an event you'd want to miss.
Check out the official event page for more info.