Grant: Alliance Grants

In e-commerce, successful recommendations represent tremendous potential for cross-selling and escalated average order sizes per customer, increased sales revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and controlled consumption for optimizing resources. In the 2020 era of COVID-19, by April 21, U.S. and Canadian e-commerce orders had already exhibited 129% year-over-year growth, with an impressive 146 % increase in total online retail orders. However, the wide spread of user-adaptive recommendation systems (RSs) in open platforms and information access domains such as e-commerce provides a strong motivation for unscrupulous users to inject malicious profiles, "shilling attacks" into the RSs to manipulate recommendation rankings to gain economic advantage. It is crucial to maintain the fairness of recommendations by constructing a robust system with stable recommendations in the presence of shilling attacks. Though targeted at enhancing accuracy, current detection methods fail to identify malicious users and targeted items for obfuscated attacks when attackers add noise, shift targets, shift user ratings, or use different natural language to hide their attack signature and remain undetected. In particular, there has been an increase in spamming attacks in Arabic, which aims to negatively impact the Canadian e-commerce market. The main importance and necessity of the international collaboration with the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Egypt is to investigate and develop efficient methods of understanding the multi-lingual shilling attacks with a focus on the Arabic Language. The novel models and methods investigated in this proposed international collaboration offer efficient and robust systems to 1) protect both businesses and consumers, 2) enhance the customer shopping experience, and 3) increase sales and revenues. The main objective of the proposed work focuses on providing better marketplace opportunities that enable businesses to boost their e-commerce presence and digitize business processes so that they can perform better in the Canadian retail e-commerce market through solid training of HQP in highly desirable and cutting-edge techniques.