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Concerns about location privacy increasingly arise with rapid advances and adoption of location based services. Most existing location privacy notions and mechanisms either do not consider the spatiotemporal correlations within users? trajectories or do not provide protection for users? sensitive spatiotemporal activities beyond their location at individual time points. In this talk, I will present our work towards rigorous and customizable privacy notions, extending the differential privacy framework, for location and spatiotemporal event protection. I will describe privacy mechanisms designed to achieve these privacy guarantees. Finally, I will present empirical studies of using such perturbed locations in location based applications such as POI search and geospatial crowdsourcing.

Bio:

Li Xiong is Professor of Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics at Emory University and holds a Winship Distinguished Research Professorship. She has a PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MS from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS from University of Science and Technology of China, all in Computer Science. She and her research group, Assured Information Management and Sharing (AIMS), conduct research that addresses both fundamental and applied questions at the interface of data privacy and security, spatiotemporal data management, and health informatics. She has published over 100 papers in premier journals and conferences including TKDE, JAMIA, VLDB, ICDE, CCS, and WWW, and has received four best paper awards. She currently serves as program co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL 2018 and 2019, associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), and on many program committees for data management and data security conferences. She is a recipient of a Google Research Award, IBM Smarter Healthcare Faculty Innovation Award, Cisco Research Award, and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Her research is supported by NSF (National Science Foundation), NIH (National Institute of Health), AFOSR (Air Force Office of Scientific Research), and PCORI (Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute).

Contact

Bin Ren