The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 7- November 10, 2017 in Redondo Beach, California. The purpose was to bring together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners in relation to novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge, and fostering interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of geographic information systems.
The goal of this track was to present visionary ideas at the conference.
Ramamohanarao Kotagiri, The University of Melbourne
Jianzhong Qi, The University of Melbourne
Egemen Tanin, The University of Melbourne
Sadegh Motallebi, The University of Melbourne
A large number of self-driving cars will be on roads in the near future. They will change traffic significantly. Self-driving cars can infer and decide travel paths from passenger input and passengers do not need to involve in route planning. This provides great opportunities for traffic management systems to collaborate and achieve more efficient traffic management. By knowing most source- destination pairs of the passengers, we envisage an increasingly integrated system that can optimize routes, traffic, and lights to minimize travel time. By optimally scheduling time of travel and traffic light switching timings, such systems can also provide simultaneously emergency corridors for high priority vehicles such as police cars, fire engines, and ambulances when required.
2) Second Place- LocBorg: Hiding Social Media User Location while Maintaining Online Persona
Victor Zakhary, University of California, Santa BarbaraCetin Sahin, University of California, Santa BarbaraTheodore Georgiou, University of California, Santa BarbaraAmr El Abbadi, University of California, Santa Barbara
Social media streams analysis can reveal the characteristics of people who engage with or write about different topics. Recent works show that it is possible to reveal sensitive attributes (e.g., location, gender, ethnicity, political views, etc.) of individuals by analyzing their social media streams. Although, the prediction of a user’s sensitive attributes can be used to enhance the user experience in social media, revealing some attributes like the location could represent a threat on individuals. Users can obfuscate their location by posting about random topics linked to different locations. How- ever, posting about random and sometimes contradictory topics that are not aligned with a user’s online persona and posts could negatively affect the followers interested in her profile. This paper represents our vision about the future of user privacy on social media. Users can locally deploy a cyborg, an artificial intelligent system that helps people to defend their privacy on social media. We propose LocBorg, a location privacy preserving cyborg that protects users by obfuscating their location while maintaining their online persona. LocBorg analyzes the social media streams and recommends topics to write about that are similar to a user’s topics of interest and aligned with the user’s online persona but linked to other locations.
3) Third Place- Geotagging IP Packets for Location-Aware Software-Defined Networking in the Presence of Virtual Network Functions
Tamraparni Dasu, AT&T Labs-Research
Yaron Kanza, AT&T Labs-Research
Divesh Srivastava, AT&T Labs-Research
A substantial portion of the global telecommunication is based on the Internet Protocol (IP), where IP packets are routed from a source host to a destination host via a communication network. While there is some loose connection between IP addresses and geospatial locations, associating packets to geographic coordinates merely according to IP addresses is hard, and o en infeasible in real- time, given the rapidity and prodigious volume of packet traffic via routers and switches. This obstructs using geospatial information about the origin, destination, or route of IP packets or flows.
In this paper we introduce a vision of adding geotags to IP packets, to enhance the capabilities of communication networks and of location-based services. We explain how the augmentation can be done flexibly and effectively using two new networking technologies: (1) software defined networking (SDN)—a new architecture that facilitates the ability to control network flows, and (2) network function virtualization (NFV) which allows deploying virtual network services, and chaining such services to one another. We describe new applications that can be built using the enrichment of packets with spatial or temporal properties, including applications related to network security, geofencing and operations support systems. We discuss challenges and research directions in this domain.
CCC provides travel awards to authors of the winning papers. We encourage you to apply for a Blue Sky Ideas track at your conference!
