Human Mobility Discovery Using Location-Based Social Networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "Human Mobility Discovery Using Location-Based Social Networks"

by

Miss Ting WU


Abstract:

Location-based services have attracted the interests of millions of users 
by providing them with the ability to access on-line services from any 
place where Internet connectivity is available. While millions of users 
exploit location-based social networks, they generate sequences of digital 
mobility traces that are unprecedented in terms of number of users, 
spatio-temporal granularity and geographic reach. Intuitively, the 
exploitation of mobility datasets generated in location-based social 
networks can be helpful to compare and validate models and theories that 
have been enabled by scientists to explain the motivations behind human 
mobility and even predict the future movements of individuals. Moreover, 
in order to extend well-established new generation of mobile applications, 
such as search and recommender systems, understanding how the users of 
these service decide to move across space is fundamental. Besides the 
beneficial effects of human mobility on user interaction with 
location-based social networks, there are challenges that brought by the 
characteristics of these new data and integration in computational models. 
In this survey, I discuss the new properties and challenges that locations 
brings to the human mobility discovery using LBSNs. I present a 
comprehensive analysis to summerize the contributions of individual 
efforts and exploring their relations. These works including 1) emprical 
validation of past human mobility theories in the light of new data 
generated by LBSNs, 2) methodologies employed to mine human mobility 
pattern and adapt appropriate algorithms for human trajectory computation, 
3) Different categories of recommender systems that leverage location 
features of LBSNs to enhace social networking services.


Date:			Tuesday, 7 January 2014

Time:                   10:00am - 12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 3501
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Pan Hui (Supervisor)
 			Prof. James Kwok (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Dr. Raymond Wong


**** ALL are Welcome ****