Computer Science Colloquium: Osman Abul

From Location to Location Pattern Privacy

Abstract: Location privacy is getting increased attention due to mass use of Location Based Services (LBSs). Location privacy aims at protecting individuals' exact location from LBS providers. For this purpose, sharing coarse locations respecting users' location privacy profiles are commonly applied. The problem gets more complicated especially in urban areas where user movements are restricted on roads and the visited places are semantically annotated like bars, night clubs etc. This way location can act as an intrusive inference on people's personal preferences and habits. So, location privacy is not confined to privacy of location itself. Moreover, any sensitive pattern in users' trajectories can be resurfaced by data mining.
In this talk, especially for urban area mobility, I will give how location privacy profiles can be defined and maintained w.r.t. possible attack models. Then, I will introduce temporally annotated sequences as a means to define sensitive location patterns. Finally, a sensitive location pattern suppression mechanism running in online stream fashion of LBS access will be detailed. 

Speaker Bio: Osman Abul is currently an associate professor of computer science at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey. He received his PhD degree in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He held visiting posts in University of Calgary, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Italian Institute of Information Science and Technology. His research interests include data mining, data privacy and bioinformatics.

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