LOCATING EVERYTHING DIGITALMICHAEL R. EVANS
CHINTAN PATEL
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
{MEVANS,CPATEL}@CS.UMN.EDU
VISION<location/>
ENHANCE PROSPERITY
Commerce: Hyper-local advertising
• Out-“local” Groupon• New York Times, “In Groupon’s $6 Billion Wake, a Fleet of Start-Ups”
• Enhanced location-based services• More targeted ads, more customer interest
Government: Laws, Regulations and Revenues
• Online sales tax• California Law ~= $300 million a year!1
Commercial Applications (Geo-DRM)
• Geo-Digital Rights Management2
• MLB.com, Hulu
1http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/30/business/la-fi-amazon-tax-201106302Bishr, M., Wytzisk, A., Morales, J., (2007) “GeoDRM: Towards Digital Management of Intellectual Property Rights for Spatial Data Infrastructures” in Research and Theory in Advancing Spatial Data Infrastructure Concepts, ed. Onsrud, H, Redlands, CA: ESRI Press
ENHANCE SECURITYGeo-location authentication to strengthen passwords
• Access Restrictions• Limit access based on geo-location
• Applications• Prevent phishing, cyber-crime, identity theft• Internet fraud reduction
• Banks look at location of Internet clients• May have prevented Wikileaks
Geographic restrictions on Internet routes
• Cloud Computing• Geographic restriction of data storage
location and transfer routes• Some countries demand readability of all
data packets passing through territory
ENHANCE CIVILITY
Anonymity often leads to increased aggression1
• Facilitates cyber-crime, such as phishing attacks, flash mobs• “Flash Mob Crime surges: Social Media an enabler?”
• http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504943_162-20096316-10391715.html
Knowing location of message sources may…
• Reduce phishing attacks• May reduce incivility• Need to balance with censorship risks
Eric Schmidt of Google
• “True anonymity is too dangerous…”2
1Wikipedia, “Social psychology (psychology) ,” 2011.2http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-08-12/opinion/29879141_1_online-anonymity-collateral-damage-randi-zuckerberg
CHALLENGE
HOW HARD IS THIS PROBLEM?
Possibly Undecidable• Fully automatic solutions may not
be possible• May need a collection of humans
and computers
Volunteer Geographic Information• OpenStreetMaps during Haiti
earthquake 2009• DARPA Red Balloon Challenge
AI & Machine Learning• IBM Watson hypotheses generation
Validating geo-location once we have it?
• Authentication & Authorization
An undecidable problem is a decision problem for which it is impossible to construct a single algorithm that always leads to a correct yes-or-no answer.
VOLUNTEERED GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION (VGI)
Human geo-locating of media:
• Ability to quickly match objects even at different angles• Can handle changes in seasons
Proven effective for mapping, crisis support, etc
Humans can’t search massive data
• Exhaustion, attention-span, etc• Humans can slowly find exact matches• Computers can quickly find rough matches
MACHINE LEARNING
IBM’s Watson can play Jeopardy, what else can it play?
• Using clues to perform vast searches, evaluate hundreds of conjectures
James Hays, Alexei A. Efros. IM2GPS: estimating geographic information from a single image. Proceedings of the IEEE Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2008.
HOW TO AUTHENTICATE GEO-LOCATION?
Challenge Protocols
• Varying power levels, location-specific questions, etc
Authentic and Secure Geo-Location Reporting
• A RSA keyfob with GPS built in?
Geo-enable Internet Infrastructure
• Geo-fencing, routing restrictions, expiration policies• Geo-hardware??
RSA + GPS
SOCIAL CHALLENGES
QUESTIONS?
This work supported by the NSF and the USDOD.