Title: Personalization, Socialization, and Recommendations in Location-based Services 2.0

Abstract: 

The wide increase of web-based user-generated contents, and social networking technologies have led to the wide popularity of the term Web 2.0, in which the World Wide Web is moved from being an interface for information retrieval to an interactive media. Following Web 2.0, a flurry of 2.0s have appeared including Library 2.0, Travel 2.0, Government 2.0, and even Revolution 2.0. In this talk, we present our vision towards Location-based Services (LBS) 2.0, where users can generate significant location-based contents, and have a location-aware interaction with both the system and other users. We address three main aspects of LBS 2.0, namely, personalization, socialization, and recommendations. In terms of personalization, LBS 2.0 needs to go beyond the rigid nearest-neighbor queries to the more personalized best-neighbor queries where the user preference and context are taken into account when deciding on the query answer. In terms of socialization, LBS 2.0 needs to go beyond using the location information as extra attributes in existing social networks to injecting the location-awareness into the core functionality of social networks. For recommendations, LBS 2.0 needs to adapt existing commercially successful recommender systems techniques to consider the spatial aspects when making any of its decisions. Overall, we discuss how these aspects can be glued together towards a vision of LBS 2.0.

Bio:

Mohamed Mokbel is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota. His current main research interests focus on providing database and platform support for spatial data, moving objects, and location-based services. Mohamed is the main architect for the PLACE, Casper, and CareDB systems that provide a database support for location-based services, location privacy, and personalization, respectively. His research work has been recognized by two best paper awards at IEEE MASS 2008 and MDM 2009 and by the NSF CAREER award 2010. Mohamed is currently the general co-chair of SSTD 2011 and program co-chair for MDM 2011, DMSN 2011, and LBSN 2011. Mohamed was also the proceeding chair of ACM SIGMOD 2010, and the program co-chair for ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2008, 2009, and 2010. He serves in the editorial board of IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal, and Journal of Spatial Information Science. Mohamed is an ACM and IEEE member and a founding member of ACM SIGSPATIAL. For more information, please visit: www.cs.umn.edu/~mokbel