Seminar by Igor Bilogrevic from Google
Abstract:
The use of location data has greatly benefited from the availability of location-based services, the popularity of social networks, and the accessibility of public location data sets. However, in addition to providing users with the ability to obtain accurate driving directions or the convenience of geo-tagging friends and pictures, location is also a very sensitive type of data, as attested by more than a decade of research on different aspects of privacy related to location data.
In this talk, we focus on two domains that rely on location data as their core component: Geospatial applications (such as thematic maps and crowdsourced geo-information) and location-based social networks. We discuss the increasing relevance of geospatial applications to the current location-aware services, and we describe relevant concepts such as volunteered geographic information, geo-surveillance and how they relate to privacy. Then, we focus on a subcategory of geospatial applications, location-based social networks, and we present the main privacy challenges and approaches that have been proposed to mitigate such challenges.
Bio
Igor Bilogrevic is a Research Scientist at Google, where he works on machine learning and data mining techniques in order to build novel privacy and security features in our products. He earned a PhD on the privacy of context-aware mobile networks from EPFL (Switzerland), where he investigated privacy issues at different layers of the network stack and proposed privacy-enhancing mechanisms for information-sharing that work across different layers. From 2010 until 2012, Igor worked in collaboration with the Nokia Research Center on privacy challenges in pervasive mobile networks, encompassing data privacy, social community privacy, location privacy and information-sharing. In 2013, he interned with PARC (a Xerox Company) and worked on topics related to private data analytics. His main areas of interest include applications of machine learning for privacy, private data analytics, contextual intelligence, applied cryptography, and user experience.