Inferring and impacting people's social behavior by exploiting their spatiotemporal location data

Speaker:        Professor Cyrus Shahabi
                University of Southern California

Title:          "Inferring and impacting people's social behavior by
                 exploiting their spatiotemporal location data"

Date:           Monday, 18 January 2016

Time:           11:00am - 12 noon

Venue:          Lecture Theater G (near lifts 25 & 26), HKUST

Abstract:

For decades, social scientists have been studying people's social
behaviors by utilizing sparse datasets obtained by observations and
surveys.These studies received a major boost in the past decade due to the
availability of web data (e.g., social networks, blogs and review web
sites). However, due to the nature of the utilized dataset, these studies
were confined to behaviors that were observed mostly in the virtual world.
Differing from all the earlier work, here, we aim to study social
behaviors by observing people's behaviors in the real world.This is now
possible due to the availability of large high-resolution spatiotemporal
location data collected by GPS-enabled mobile devices through mobile apps
(Google's Map/Navigation/Search/Chrome, Facebook, Foursquare, WhatsApp,
Twitter) or through online services, such as geo-tagged contents (tweets
from Twitter, pictures from Instagram, Flickr or Google+ Photo), etc.

In particular, we first focus on /inferring/ and quantifying two specific
social measures: 1) /pair-wise/ strength -- the strength of social
connections between a pair of users, and 2) /pair-wise/ influence - the
amount of influence that an individual exerts on another, by utilizing the
available high-fidelity location data representing people's movements.
Next, we focus on how we can use mobile-devices to /impact/ people's
social behavior, in the context of a spatial-crowdsourcing framework.
These are preliminary steps to a comprehensive study of social behaviors
in both real and virtual worlds.


************************
Biography:

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical
Engineering and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at
the Computer Science Department and also the Director of the NSF's
Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern
California (USC). He is also the director of Informatics at USC's Viterbi
School of Engineering.He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off,
Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. Since then, he
founded another company, ClearPath (recently rebranded as TallyGo),
focusing on predictive path-planning for car navigation systems. He
received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of
Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science
from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996,
respectively. He authored two books and more than two hundred research
papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 12 US
Patents.

Dr. Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as NSF, NIJ,
NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, and DHS as well as several industries such as
Chevron, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR, NGC and Oracle. He was an
Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
(TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is
currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial
Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is
the founding chair of IEEE NetDB workshop and also the general co-chair of
SSTD'15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008 and 2009. He chaired the nomination committee
of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. He is a PC co-Chair of
BigComp'2016 and MDM'2016. In the past, he has been PC co-chair of DASFAA
2015, IEEE MDM 2013 and IEEE BigData 2013, and regularly serves on the
program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE
ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.

Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM Distinguished
Scientist award in 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards
for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and
the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and
Telecommunications. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education
Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer
of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering "Japan-America Frontiers of
Engineering" program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research
Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions
for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the
2005 National Academy of Engineering "Frontiers of Engineering" program.