Dino Pedreschi

Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy

The technologies of mobile communications and ubiquitous computing pervade our society, and wireless networks sense the movement of people and vehicles, generating large volumes of mobility data. This is a scenario of great opportunities and risks: on one side, mining this data can produce useful knowledge, supporting sustainable mobility and intelligent transportation systems; on the other side, individual privacy is at risk, as the mobility data contain sensitive personal information. A new multidisciplinary research area is emerging at this crossroads of mobility, data mining, and privacy.
This talk briefly assesses this research frontier from a computer science perspective, and illustrates the results of a European-wide research project called GeoPKDD, Geographic Privacy-Aware Knowledge Discovery and Delivery, funded by the EU Commission under the FET-Open program. Particular attention will be placed upon privacy-aware geographic knowledge discovery and spatio-temporal data mining from mobility data generated by wireless networks, mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing.