Computer Science and Engineering

<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

The increasing availability of Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled devices has given an opportunity for learning patterns of human behavior from the GPS traces. This paper describes how to extract popular and significant places (locations) by analyzing the GPS traces of multiple users. In contrast to the existing techniques, this approach takes into account the semantic aspects of the places in order to find interesting places in a geo-spatial region. GPS traces of multiple users are used for mining the places which are frequently visited by multiple users. However, the semantic meanings, such as 'historical monument', 'traffic signal', etc can further improve the ranking of popular places. The end result is the ranked list of popular places in a given geo-spatial region. This information can be useful for recommending interesting places to the tourists, planning locations for advertisement hoardings, traffic planning, etc. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

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(SoE) School of Engineering

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Mining Popular Places in a Geo-spatial Region Based on GPS Data Using Semantic Information

In this paper, we study the important problems of message routing, sorting, and selection in a radio network. A radio network consists of stations where each station is a hand-held device. We consider a single-hop radio network where it is assumed that each station is within the transmission range of every other station. Let RN(p,k) stand for a single-hop network that has p stations and k communication channels. The best known prior algorithm for sorting takes 4nk+o(nk) broadcast rounds on a RN(p,k). In this paper, we present a randomized algorithm that takes only 3nk+o(nk) broadcast rounds with high probability. For the selection problem, we present a randomized selection algorithm that takes O(pk) rounds on a RN(p,k) with high probability. The best known prior algorithms for the np-relations routing problem take nearly 2nk time slots (i.e., broadcast rounds). An important open question has been if there exist algorithms that take only close to nk time slots. Note that a trivial lower bound for routing is nk. The existence of such algorithms will be highly relevant, especially in emergencies and time-critical situations. In this paper, we answer this question by presenting a randomized algorithm that takes nearly nk rounds on the average. We also present a deterministic algorithm that takes nearly nk rounds. These routing algorithms are also shown to be energy efficient. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

Communication and energy efficient routing protocols for single-hop radio networks

The growths of internet, Global Positioning System (GPS) and wireless telecommunication technologies have opened new avenues in potential area of mobile computing called Location Based Services (LBS). Recommendation of personalized information / services in location based services has become an attractive trend for success of businesses. A Recommender System attempts to solve the problem of information overload and provides product and service recommendation based on user profile and preferences. The location of the user is an important information item that can be associated to the existing user profile in order to provide efficient recommendations. Also, easy availability of GPS enabled devices brings a large amount of GPS trajectories representing user's mobile logs. These GPS trajectories can be used to mine interesting patterns about users. We have studied the utility and application of information extracted from user's GPS trajectory data in recommender systems. We conceive that recommendation has an intrinsic social component and therefore this work takes a perspective towards the social aspect in location based recommender systems. In this paper, we are presenting the stateof- the-art research trends, challenges and applications in the area of Location-Based Recommender Systems (LBRS).

IET Conference Publications

Location based recommender systems: Architecture, trends and research areas

The increasing trend of embedding positioning capabilities (e.g., GPS) in mobile devices facilitates the widespread use of Location Based Services. For such applications to succeed, privacy and confidentiality are key issues. Over all privacy will have to be managed through a combination of technology, legislation, corporate policy, and social norms. There are many data privacy schemes including Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) those can be used for location privacy. ZKP is also useful for removing the bottleneck problem introduced by use of trusted third party. In the earlier work, authors proposed the concept of middleware architecture in which, request and response are not routed through middleware for every transaction. This has reduced the dependency on middleware. This paper presents correspondence between the authentication techniques used in above said architecture and zero knowledge proof technique. Use of the concept of zero knowledge proof for authentication and authorization in the domain of location based services is also explored. © 2012 IEEE.

Proceedings - 2012 IEEE 13th International Conference on Mobile Data Management, MDM 2012

Defending location privacy using zero knowledge proof concept in location based services

The middleware is the most commonly used solution to address the location privacy. But it becomes a bottleneck in terms of system performance and availability as the entire client's service transactions are routed through the middleware to the actual Location Based Service Providers (LSP). The proposed architecture mainly targets a variety of applications where the availability of the services is probably more important than the location security. In the new flexible middleware based architecture the client and the LSPs can communicate directly. Autonomy on the client-server communication increases the possibility of communication even in the scenarios where the middleware is not available. But it also introduces authentication and security challenges to be addressed. The trusted middleware is used to generate the authentication certificates containing the Proxy Identity (also called Pseudonyms) to fulfill the authentication requirements at the LSP servers. The rest of transactions among the clients and the LSPs are accomplished independently. Further, the level of anonymity can be tuned by altering pseudonyms generation techniques i.e. "One-to-One", "One-to-Many" and "Many-to-One" depending on the type of the service and security requirements. It also attempts to maintain almost the same level of security for the targeted services. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering

Reducing dependency on middleware for pull based active services in LBS systems

The geographical areas that are considered to be popular and interesting are called Region of Interest (ROI). There are multiple sources that can be used for erecting the ROIs such as user trajectory, POI databases, internet news etc. A tourist spot, historical region, monuments, a forest reserve, city, state or country's administrative boundaries are considered as the ROI objects. The interesting facts of the regions can be used for on-the-spot infotainment (information + entertainment) while user is walking, driving or just sitting idle on the flight. One may want the information in different level of details based on the interests, travel direction, and speed. The best way to get the recent information is going through the internet news, discussion forums, and encyclopedias on the web. The challenge is that there is no universal database available that contains the region information along with the location based search capabilities. The maintaining the granularity of the information based on the size or the details of the region adds more challenges. The broader idea of our work is to use the existing LBS infrastructure to track the user and achieve other navigation objectives in the system. However, the freely available up-to-date internet infrastructure is used as the information source. Initially, the user location is determined by the conventional methods. In order to relate the location with the web content, we use the semantic labels associated to the underlying location. The semantic labels are fetched by using reverse geocoding that returns the local attractions, street city, state and country names etc. Then these labels are used to search the associated detailed content in the web. The region data is maintained in two forms i.e. locally populated database and the web databases. The locally populated database can be updated on the preconfigured time interval in order to avoid data staleness problem. We have used Wikipedia as the internet data source in our prototype. The further research is in progress extracting the ROI information from the POI databases with their spatial and non-spatial attributes. © 2012 IEEE.

Extracting Region of Interest (ROI) details using LBS infrastructure and web-databases

Huge information is inherently associated with certain places in the globe. The ancient cities have multiple locations with large historical, geographical, cultural and architectural specialties. E-Learning systems allow the learners to learn irrespective of their time and place. The location based learning (LBL) is another aspect where the site seeing, and touching the building walls are the means of real-time experience of the sites. This manifestation motivates us to extend the capabilities of conventional E-learning systems so that the information can be accessed at the real-time based on the user's location. In this paper, the e-Learning system is used for the LBL with the help of navigation capabilities without modifying the existing systems. The learning content geocoding, reverse-geocoding, and real-time learning plan generation based on the user preferences and constraints have been proposed. The on-the-way learning is another aspect of the LBL that has been proposed with a prototype implementation. The implemented system is a flexible and visually appealing LBL platform with a possibility to get the real-time location specific information both from webdatabases and locally stored content.

Fusion of navigation technology and e-learning systems for on-the-spot learning

Scheduling a meeting is a difficult task for people who have overbooked calendars and many constraints. The complexity increases when the meeting is to be scheduled between parties who are situated in geographically distant locations of a city and have varying travel patterns. In this paper, we present a solution that identifies a common meeting point for a group of users who have temporal and spatial locality constraints that vary over time. The problem entails answering an Optimal Meeting Point (OMP) query in spatial databases. Under Euclidean space OMP query solution identification gets reduced to the problem of determining the geometric median of a set of points, a problem for which no exact solution exists. The OMP problem does not consider any constraints as far as availability of users is concerned whereas that is a key constraint in our setting. We there- fore focus on finding a solution that uses daily movements information obtained from GPS traces for each user to compute stay points during various times of the day. We then determine interesting locations by analyzing the stay points across multiple users. The novelty of our solution is that the computations are done within the database by using various relational algebra operations in combination with statistical operations on the GPS trajectory data. This makes our solution scalable to larger groups of users and for multiple such requests. Once this list of stay points and interesting locations are obtained, we show that this data can be utilized to construct spatiotemporal graphs for the users that allow us eficiently decide a meeting place. We perform experiments on a real-world dataset and show that our method is effective in finding an optimal meeting point between two users. Copyright © 2012 ACM.

ACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Mining GPS traces to recommend common meeting points

In data integration, schema matching plays an important role. Present schema matching tools combine various match algorithms, each employing a particular technique to improve matching accuracy. However there is still no fully automatic tool is available and also there is lack of accuracy. As a step in this direction, we have proposed a new and efficient Semantic-Relationship schema matching (SR-Match) approach which considers the semantic relationships as one of the parameters for matching. Here in SR-Match, the initial mappings performed by the basic schema mapping techniques, acts as input to the relationship matcher. Relationship matcher compares the remaining unmapped elements based on their semantic relationship with their parents. It is observed that, if both semantics and relationships are taken into account, the degree of accuracy in matching results is improved. © Springer-Verlag 2011.

Communications in Computer and Information Science

SR-match: A novel schema matcher based on semantic relationship

The trusted middleware is the most commonly used solution to address the location privacy in location based services as generally such service providers are un-trusted entities that can be adversary attack sensitive points. The authors proposed an alternative solution which helps in avoiding a bottleneck in the existing system in terms of performance and availability as the entire client's service transactions are routed through the middleware to the actual Location Based Service Providers (LSP). In the proposed solution, the client and the LSPs can directly communicate with the same level of location security, privacy and anonymity. The trusted middleware is used as certifying authority that generates authentication certificates which contains the Proxy Identity (also called Pseudonyms), and the services subscribed with validity period. The encrypted certificate fulfills the authentication requirements at the LSP servers. In this paper we are reporting the implementation of the proposed system as a proof of concept using Struts Technology of Java. While evaluating the system features such as response time, delay, drop rate etc., the Google Map's location services and the internet browser have been considered as a service provider and client respectively. Performance analysis of our solution and that of prevalent architecture is done using Packmime model for http traffic generation of NS2 (Network Simulator 2) tool. The comparative graphs of the simulation results show that the proposed solution is better in terms of throughput, response time, drop rate and scalability in comparison to the existing middleware architectures in which the request response is every time routed through middleware, thus increasing the overheads. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.