Within the next several years, there will be a high level of autonomous technology that will be available for widespread use, which will reduce labor costs, increase safety, save energy, enable difficult unmanned tasks in harsh environments, and eliminate human error. Compared to software development for other autonomous vehicles, maritime software development, especially in aging but still functional fleets, is described as being in a very early and emerging phase. This presents great challenges and opportunities for researchers and engineers to develop maritime autonomous systems. Recent progress in sensor and communication technology has introduced the use of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) in applications such as coastline surveillance, oceanographic observation, multi-vehicle cooperation, and search and rescue missions. Advanced artificial intelligence technology, especially deep learning (DL) methods that conduct nonlinear mapping with self-learning representations, has brought the concept of full autonomy one step closer to reality. This article reviews existing work on the implementation of DL methods in fields related to ASV. First, the scope of this work is described after reviewing surveys on ASV developments and technologies, which draws attention to the research gap between DL and maritime operations. Then, DL-based navigation, guidance, control (NGC) systems and cooperative operations are presented. Finally, this survey is completed by highlighting current challenges and future research directions.

Linking online identities of users among countless heterogeneous network services on the Internet can provide an explicit digital representation of users, which can benefit both research and industry. In recent years, user identity linkage (UIL) through the Internet has become an emerging task with great potential and many challenges. Existing works mainly focus on online social networks that consider inconsistent profiles, content, and networks as features or use sparse location-based data sets to link the online behaviors of a real person. To extend the UIL problem to a general scenario, we try to link the web-browsing behaviors of users, which can help to distinguish specific users from others, such as children or malicious users. More specifically, we propose a Siamese neural network (NN) architecture-based UIL (SAUIL) model that learns and compares the highest-level feature representation of input web-browsing behaviors with deep NNs. Although the number of matching and nonmatching pairs for the UIL problem is highly imbalanced, previous studies have not considered imbalanced UIL data sets. Therefore, we further address the imbalanced learning issue by proposing cost-sensitive SAUIL (C-SAUIL) model, which assumes higher costs for misclassifying the minority class. In the experiments, the proposed model is robust and exhibits a good performance on very large, real-world data sets collected from different regions with distinct characteristics.

The recent explosion of data traffic calls for specialized systems to monitor the status of networks. Traditionally, Internet service providers collect and analyze IP flow data as they present an aggregated view of traffic. In the era of mobile big data, new approaches are required to address new challenges regarding the flow characterization in the next generation wireless networks. In this article, we propose a framework for mobile big data, referred to as FMBD, which provides massive data traffic collection, storage, processing, analysis, and management functions, to cope with the tremendous amount of data traffic. In particular, by analyzing the specific characteristics of the mobile big data from flow, application, and user behavior, such as high volume, diversity of applications, and spatio-temporal distribution, our proposed FMBD demonstrates its capability to offer real data-based advice to address new challenges for future wireless networks from the viewpoints of both operators and individuals. Tested by real mobile big data, FMBD has been operational for more than five years, and can be generalized to other environments with massive data traffic or big data.

Understanding the relationships between items can improve the accuracy and interpretability of recommender systems. Among these relationships, the substitute and complement relationships attract the most attention in e-commerce platforms. The substitutable items are interchangeable and might be compared with each other before purchasing, while the complementary items are used in conjunction and are usually bought together with the query item. In this paper, we focus on two issues of inferring the substitutable and complementary items: 1) how to model their mutual influence to improve the performance of downstream tasks, 2) how to further discriminate them by considering the strength of relationship for different item pairs. We propose a novel multi-task learning framework named Enhanced Multi-Relationships Integration Graph Convolutional Network (EMRIGCN). We regard the relationship inference task as a link prediction task in heterogeneous graph with different types of edges between nodes (items). To model the mutual influence between substitute and complement, EMRIGCN adopts a two-level integration module, i.e., feature and structure integration, based on experts sharing mechanism during message passing. To obtain the strength of relationship for item pairs, we build an auxiliary loss function to further increase or decrease the distances between embeddings of items with weak or strong relation in latent space. Extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets prove that EMRIGCN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions. We also conducted A/B tests on real world recommender systems of Meituan Maicai, an online supermarket platform in China, and obtained 15.3% improvement on VBR and 15.34% improvement on RPM.

The KBQA (Knowledge-Based Question Answering) system is an essential part of the smart customer service system. KBQA is a type of QA (Question Answering) system based on KB (Knowledge Base). It aims to automatically answer natural language questions by retrieving structured data stored in the knowledge base. Generally, when a KBQA system receives the user’s query, it first needs to recognize topic entities of the query, such as name, location, organization, etc. This process is the NER (Named Entity Recognition). In this paper, we use the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Conditional Random Field (Bi-LSTM-CRF) model and introduce the SoftLexicon method for a Chinese NER task. At the same time, according to the analysis of the characteristics of application scenario, we propose a fuzzy matching module based on the combination of multiple methods. This module can efficiently modify the error recognition results, which can further improve the performance of entity recognition. We combine the NER model and the fuzzy matching module into an NER system. To explore the availability of the system in some specific fields, such as a power grid field, we utilize the power grid-related original data collected by the Hebei Electric Power Company to improve our system according to the characteristics of data in the power grid field. We innovatively make the dataset and high-frequency word lexicon in the power grid field, which makes our proposed NER system perform better in recognizing entities in the field of power grid. We used the cross-validation method for validation. The experimental results show that the F1-score of the improved NER model on the power grid dataset reaches 92.43%. After processing the recognition results by using the fuzzy matching module, about 99% of the entities in the test set can be correctly recognized. It proves that the proposed NER system can achieve excellent performance in the application scenario of a power grid. The results of this work will also fill the gap in the research of intelligent customer-service-related technologies in the power grid field in China.