Multi-Graph Heterogeneous Interaction Fusion for Social Recommendation

With the rapid development of online social recommendation system, substantial methods have been proposed. Unlike traditional recommendation system, social recommendation performs by integrating social relationship features, where there are two major challenges, i.e., early summarization and data sparsity. Thus far, they have not been solved effectively. In this article, we propose a novel social recommendation approach, namely Multi-Graph Heterogeneous Interaction Fusion (MG-HIF), to solve these two problems. Our basic idea is to fuse heterogeneous interaction features from multi-graphs, i.e., user–item bipartite graph and social relation network, to improve the vertex representation learning. A meta-path cross-fusion model is proposed to fuse multi-hop heterogeneous interaction features via discrete cross-correlations. Based on that, a social relation GAN is developed to explore latent friendships of each user. We further fuse representations from two graphs by a novel multi-graph information fusion strategy with attention mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to combine meta-path with social relation representation. To evaluate the performance of MG-HIF, we compare MG-HIF with seven states of the art over four benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that MG-HIF achieves better performance.

Social Context-aware Person Search in Videos via Multi-modal Cues

Person search has long been treated as a crucial and challenging task to support deeper insight in personalized summarization and personality discovery. Traditional methods, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition techniques, which profile video characters based on visual information, are often limited by relatively fixed poses or small variation of viewpoints and suffer from more realistic scenes with high motion complexity (e.g., movies). At the same time, long videos such as movies often have logical story lines and are composed of continuously developmental plots. In this situation, different persons usually meet on a specific occasion, in which informative social cues are performed. We notice that these social cues could semantically profile their personality and benefit person search task in two aspects. First, persons with certain relationships usually co-occur in short intervals; in case one of them is easier to be identified, the social relation cues extracted from their co-occurrences could further benefit the identification for the harder ones. Second, social relations could reveal the association between certain scenes and characters (e.g., classmate relationship may only exist among students), which could narrow down candidates into certain persons with a specific relationship. In this way, high-level social relation cues could improve the effectiveness of person search. Along this line, in this article, we propose a social context-aware framework, which fuses visual and social contexts to profile persons in more semantic perspectives and better deal with person search task in complex scenarios. Specifically, we first segment videos into several independent scene units and abstract out social contexts within these scene units. Then, we construct inner-personal links through a graph formulation operation for each scene unit, in which both visual cues and relation cues are considered. Finally, we perform a relation-aware label propagation to identify characters’ occurrences, combining low-level semantic cues (i.e., visual cues) and high-level semantic cues (i.e., relation cues) to further enhance the accuracy. Experiments on real-world datasets validate that our solution outperforms several competitive baselines.

The Potential of Friendship: A Case for Social Resilience and New Care Optics

In this article, we call for greater recognition of friendship as a basic social relation that should play a pivotal role in re-imagining social resilience if it is to be future-proof in the face of social upheaval, such as the current pandemic. Drawing on existing research and early scoping of emergent information about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we suggest that friendship is an important component of heterogenic social realities. The specific focus of our discussion is twofold. Firstly, attention is paid to the narrow lens of social policy that privileges particular familial set-ups and living arrangements, and in doing so marginalises groups which are already disenfranchised; secondly, we consider the dangers of nationalism and Eurocentrism as they relate to these issues. We suggest that thinking in terms of friendship can open up new avenues of academic and political imagination, offering strategies with greater potential for building socially resilient communities.

The Social Relation of Muslims and Christians in Sidorejo Village, Umbulsari District, Jember Regency

This study aims to explore social relations in Sidorejo Village, Umbulsari District, Jember Regency. Central to this study is the relations and efforts to maintain harmony between Muslims and Christians in Sidorejo Village. The methodology in this study is qualitative methods using historical, religious and social approaches in-depth interview techniques and literature review analysis. The results of this study indicate that social solidarity among the people of Sidorejo in building social relations is very harmonious through several religious and social activities carried out together. Religious leaders and community leaders also participate in building harmony between Muslims and Christians in Sidorejo Village. In conclusion, the Sidorejo people enable to construct harmony and tackle social conflict through mediation before the conflict arises on the surface. Social relations are the key for the people of Sidorejo to build social-based religious harmony, because the goal of building harmony is not theological but how social relations are developed. Some social activities carried out to build communality including building houses of worship. It is more important that the role of religious leaders becomes a central force in ensuring unity and harmony. Keywords: relationship, harmony, Islam, Christian Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menggali sebuah relasi sosial dalam masyarakat Desa Sidorejo, Kecamatan Umbulsari, Kabupaten Jember. Titik fokus permasalahan yang ingin disampaikan dalam penelitian ini ialah bagaimana relasi dan upaya merawat keharmonisan antara Muslim dan Kristiani di Desa Sidorejo tersebut. Adapun metodologi dalam penelitian ini penulis menggunakan metode kualitatif dengan pendekatan sejarah, agama dan sosial secara mendalam dengan teknik wawancara dan analisa kajian pustaka. Hasil dari penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa masyarakat Sidorejo dalam membangun relasi sosial, solidaritas sosial sangat rukun dan harmonis, terbukti dengan adanya beberapa kegiatan agama, sosial dilakukan secara bersama-sama. Tiada lain tiada bukan, peran tokoh agama, tokoh masyatakat juga ikutserta dalam membangun kerukunan antara Muslim dan Kristiani di Desa Sidorejo. Kesimpulannya bahwa hubungan kehidupan masyarakat Sidorejo begitu rukun dan harmonis, resolusi konflik selalu di munculkan sebagai mediasi sebelum konflik itu timbul di permukaan. Relasi sosial menjadi kunci bagi masyarakat Sidorejo untuk membagun kerukunan agama berbasis sosial, karena tujuan membangun keharmonisan bukan dari teologisnya melainkan bagaimana hubungan sosialnya, dan ini terbukti banyak kegiatan sosial yang dilakukan untuk membangun kebersamaan, terutama membangun rumah ibadah. Terpenting lagi bahwa peran tokoh agama menjadi kekuatan sentral dalam menyatukan dan merawat kebersamaan dalam perbedaan demi mewujudkan Sidorejo yang rukun, tentram dan harmonis. Kata Kunci: relasi, harmonis, Islam, Kristen

Yung Robhoni : Tradisi Pembayaran Duka Setelah Kematian Dalam Masyarakat Sentani, Jayapura, Papua

Sentani tribe in Jayapura, Papua is rich with cultural heritages. One of them is yung robhoni, i.e. traditional payment after somebody’s death. Commonly, in society yung robhoni is literally translated into “head payment”. This terminology raise controversion. Thus, besides as an attempt of clarification, this writing aims at exploring (1) What is yung robhoni?, (2) Why yung robhoni is needed?, dan (3) How is yung robhoni carried out?. Data were collected from some informants: tribal chiefs (ondofolo, khote, akhona) and Sentani elders in East, Central, and West Sentani via deep observations and interviews. By adopting socio-cultural approach, this writing found that yung robhoni is a medium to unite, harmonize, and improve the kinship relation as a form of love and respect based on the balance of right and obligation. Hopefully, through this writing the term of “yung robhoni” is not misunderstood and the harmony of social life by maintaining the social relation, respect and balancing the right and obligation may become the positive energy for Papuan people in general.

TINA Is Dead: Reflecting on Postcapitalist Futures

Social sciences in recent years have clearly proven that TINA—There Is No Alternative (to capitalism)—is no longer tenable. Today, alterity to capitalism comes in many forms and blossoms from inside its borders. Ethnographies of experimentations that span from ecovillages and community economies to alternative forms of work, production, and consumption are now countless. One common denominator of these experiences is that communal forms of social relation take over market relations. The main theoretical issue raised by this empirical work is whether this ferment of scattered, small scale alternative ways of organizing economy and society can coalesce into a fully fledged postcapitalist future or whether it is doomed to be stay marginal and transient at best. Anthropology can be at the forefront of this theoretical challenge. We close this brief commentary by addressing the importance of a future-oriented thinking in Anthropology and for the social science in general.

What is Marxist geography today, or what is left of Marxist geography?

The history and geography of intellectual neglect of Marxism are the history and geography of Marxism itself. Scholars of different political persuasions and from different regions of the world, including some ‘Marxists’, have pointed to its various deficiencies ever since its origin. But is Marxism really as bad as it is made out to be? In this short article, I argue that it absolutely is not. I discuss my view of Marxism, including Marxist geography. The latter examines economy, politics, culture and nature/body from the vantage-point of space, place, scale and human transformation of nature. I also discuss what difference Marxism has made to my own agenda of abstract and concrete research. For me, Marxism fundamentally comprises ideas of Marx and Engels, and revolutionary Marxist socialists of the 20th century (Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky), and those who have critically developed their thinking. I discuss four major areas of Marxism: philosophy (dialectical and materialist views of society and nature), social theory, or historical materialism, (geographical) political economy, and theory of communist practice. Marxism treats class, including in its capitalist form, as the causally most important social relation which explains how human beings live their lives. Class relations, and capitalism, structure gender and racial oppression which in turn influence class relations at a concrete level, and which are behind the geographical organization of society. The main goal of Marxism is not to produce ideas for the sake of ideas. It is rather to arm the exploited masses with adequate ideas that describe, explain and critique the world from their standpoint, so they can engage in the fight to produce an alternative social-spatial arrangement, i.e. a democratic and classless society which is ecologically healthier and which avoids geographically uneven development intra-nationally and internationally.