Dr. Demetris Zeinalipour

Assistant Professor
Department of Cpmputer Science
University of Cyprus
: https://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~dzeina

Title:

Indoor Navigation Services from Mobile Data

Abstract:

People spend 80-90% of their time in indoor environments such as offices, undergrounds, libraries, shopping malls and airports. On the other hand, the uptake of interesting applications in indoor spaces has so far been hampered by the lack of technologies that can provide indoor location (position) accurately, in real-time, in an energy-efficient manner and without expensive additional hardware. In this scope, the pervasiveness of smartphones is leading to the uptake of a new class of Internet-based Indoor Navigation (IIN) services, which rely on geo-location databases to store spatial indoor models along with wireless, light and magnetic signals used to localize users and provide better power efficiency and wider coverage than predominant approaches. In this talk, I will overview the research behind the building blocks of the Anyplace IIN, an open, modular, extensible and scalable navigation architecture that exploits crowdsourced Wi-Fi data to develop a novel navigation service that won several international research awards for its utility and accuracy (i.e., less than 2 meters). Our MIT-licenced open-source software stack has to this date been used by hundreds of researchers and practitioners around the globe, with the public Anyplace service reaching over 100,000 real user interactions. In the second part of this talk, I will focus on an algorithm we developed for protecting users from location tracking by the IIN service, without hindering the provisioning of fine-grained location updates on a continuous basis. Our algorithm exploits a k-Anonymity Bloom filter and a generator of camouflaged localization requests, both of which are shown to be resilient to a variety of privacy attacks. My talk will conclude with a summary of related research challenges and results.

Short Bio:

Demetris Zeinalipour (PhD, University of California, Riverside, 2005) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Cyprus, where he founded and directs the Data Management Systems Laboratory (DMSL). Before his current appointment, he served the University of Cyprus and the Open University of Cyprus as a Lecturer of Computer Science. He has also been a short-term Visiting Researcher at the Network Intelligence Lab of Akamai Technologies, Cambridge, MA, USA (2004), a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Athens, Greece (2007) and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA (2015). During 2016-2017, he is a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. His research interests include Data Management in Computer Systems and Networks, in particular Mobile and Sensor Data Management; Big Data Management in Parallel and Distributed Architectures; Spatio-Temporal Data Management; Network and Web 2.0 Data Management; Crowd and Indoor Data Management as well as Data Privacy Management. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2017-2020), a Senior Member of ACM, a Senior Member of IEEE, and Member of USENIX. For more information, please visit: http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~dzeina/