Mohamed F. Mokbel

A peer-to-peer spatial cloaking algorithm for anonymous location-based service

This paper tackles a major privacy threat in current location-based services where users have to report their exact locations to the database server in order to obtain their desired services. For example, a mobile user asking about her nearest restaurant has to report her exact location. With untrusted service providers, reporting private location information may lead to several privacy threats. In this paper, we present a peer-to-peer (P2P)spatial cloaking algorithm in which mobile and stationary users can entertain location-based services without revealing their exact location information. The main idea is that before requesting any location-based service, the mobile user will form a group from her peers via single-hop communication and/or multi-hop routing. Then,the spatial cloaked area is computed as the region that covers the entire group of peers. Two modes of operations are supported within the proposed P2P s patial cloaking algorithm, namely, the on-demand mode and the proactive mode. Experimental results show that the P2P spatial cloaking algorithm operated in the on-demand mode has lower communication cost and better quality of services than the proactive mode, but the on-demand incurs longer response time.

SINA: scalable incremental processing of continuous queries in spatio-temporal databases

This paper intoduces the Scalable INcremental hash-based Algorithm (SINA, for short); a new algorithm for evaluting a set of concurrent continuous spatio-temporal queries. SINA is designed with two goals in mind: (1) Scalability in terms of the number of concurrent continuous spatio-temporal queries, and (2) Incremental evaluation of continyous spatio-temporal queries. SINA achieves scalability by empolying a shared execution paradigm where the execution of continuous spatio-temporal queries is abstracted as a spatial join between a set of moving objects and a set of moving queries. Incremental evaluation is achived by computing only the updates of the previously reported answer. We introduce two types of updaes, namely positive and negative updates. Positive or negative updates indicate that a certain object should be added to or removed from the previously reported answer, respectively. SINA manages the computation of postive and negative updates via three phases: the hashing phase, the invalidation phase, and the joining phase. the hashing phase employs an in-memory hash-based join algorithm that results in a set a positive upldates. The invalidation phase is triggered every T seconds or when the memory is fully occupied to produce a set of negative updates. Finally, the joining phase is triggered by the end of the invalidation phase to produce a set of both positive and negative updates that result from joining in-memory data with in-disk data. Experimental results show that SINA is scalable and is more efficient than other index-based spatio-temporal algorithms.

SEA-CNN: scalable processing of continuous k-nearest neighbor queries in spatio-temporal databases

Location-aware environments are characterized by a large number of objects and a large number of continuous queries. Both the objects and continuous queries may change their locations over time. In this paper, we focus on continuous k-nearest neighbor queries (CKNN, for short). We present a new algorithm, termed SEA-CNN, for answering continuously a collection of concurrent CKNN queries. SEA-CNN has two important features: incremental evaluation and shared execution. SEA-CNN achieves both efficiency and scalability in the presence of a set of concurrent queries. Furthermore, SEA-CNN does not make any assumptions about the movement of objects, e.g., the objects velocities and shapes of trajectories, or about the mutability of the objects and/or the queries, i.e., moving or stationary queries issued on moving or stationary objects. We provide theoretical analysis of SEA-CNN with respect to the execution costs, memory requirements and effects of tunable parameters. Comprehensive experimentation shows that SEA-CNN is highly scalable and is more efficient in terms of both I/O and CPU costs in comparison to other R-tree-based CKNN techniques.

LARS: A Location-Aware Recommender System

This paper proposes LARS, a location-aware recommender system that uses location-based ratings to produce recommendations. Traditional recommender systems do not consider spatial properties of users nor items, LARS, on the other hand, supports a taxonomy of three novel classes of location-based ratings, namely, spatial ratings for non-spatial items, non-spatial ratings for spatial items, and spatial ratings for spatial items. LARS exploits user rating locations through user partitioning, a technique that influences recommendations with ratings spatially close to querying users in a manner that maximizes system scalability while not sacrificing recommendation quality. LARS exploits item locations using travel penalty, a technique that favors recommendation candidates closer in travel distance to querying users in a way that avoids exhaustive access to all spatial items. LARS can apply these techniques separately, or in concert, depending on the type of location-based rating available. Experimental evidence using large-scale real-world data from both the Foursquare location-based social network and the Movie Lens movie recommendation system reveals that LARS is efficient, scalable, and capable of producing recommendations twice as accurate compared to existing recommendation approaches.

Recommendations in location-based social networks: a survey

Recent advances in localization techniques have fundamentally enhanced social networking services, allowing users to share their locations and location-related contents, such as geo-tagged photos and notes. We refer to these social networks as location-based social networks (LBSNs). Location data bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds and enables a deeper understanding of users’ preferences and behavior. This addition of vast geo-spatial datasets has stimulated research into novel recommender systems that seek to facilitate users’ travels and social interactions. In this paper, we offer a systematic review of this research, summarizing the contributions of individual efforts and exploring their relations. We discuss the new properties and challenges that location brings to recommender systems for LBSNs. We present a comprehensive survey analyzing 1) the data source used, 2) the methodology employed to generate a recommendation, and 3) the objective of the recommendation. We propose three taxonomies that partition the recommender systems according to the properties listed above. First, we categorize the recommender systems by the objective of the recommendation, which can include locations, users, activities, or social media. Second, we categorize the recommender systems by the methodologies employed, including content-based, link analysis-based, and collaborative filtering-based methodologies. Third, we categorize the systems by the data sources used, including user profiles, user online histories, and user location histories. For each category, we summarize the goals and contributions of each system and highlight the representative research effort. Further, we provide comparative analysis of the recommender systems within each category. Finally, we discuss the available data-sets and the popular methods used to evaluate the performance of recommender systems. Finally, we point out promising research topics for future work. This article presents a panorama of the recommender systems in location-based social networks with a balanced depth, facilitating research into this important research theme.

SpatialHadoop: A MapReduce framework for spatial data

This paper describes SpatialHadoop; a full-fledged MapReduce framework with native support for spatial data. SpatialHadoop is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that injects spatial data awareness in each Hadoop layer, namely, the language, storage, MapReduce, and operations layers. In the language layer, SpatialHadoop adds a simple and expressive high level language for spatial data types and operations. In the storage layer, SpatialHadoop adapts traditional spatial index structures, Grid, R-tree and R+-tree, to form a two-level spatial index. SpatialHadoop enriches the MapReduce layer by two new components, SpatialFileSplitter and SpatialRecordReader, for efficient and scalable spatial data processing. In the operations layer, SpatialHadoop is already equipped with a dozen of operations, including range query, kNN, and spatial join. Other spatial operations are also implemented following a similar approach. Extensive experiments on real system prototype and real datasets show that SpatialHadoop achieves orders of magnitude better performance than Hadoop for spatial data processing.

A demonstration of SpatialHadoop: an efficient mapreduce framework for spatial data

This demo presents SpatialHadoop as the first full-fledged MapReduce framework with native support for spatial data. SpatialHadoop is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that pushes spatial data inside the core functionality of Hadoop. SpatialHadoop runs existing Hadoop programs as is, yet, it achieves order(s) of magnitude better performance than Hadoop when dealing with spatial data. SpatialHadoop employs a simple spatial high level language, a two-level spatial index structure, basic spatial components built inside the MapReduce layer, and three basic spatial operations: range queries, k-NN queries, and spatial join. Other spatial operations can be similarly deployed in SpatialHadoop. We demonstrate a real system prototype of SpatialHadoop running on an Amazon EC2 cluster against two sets of real spatial data obtained from Tiger Files and OpenStreetMap with sizes 60GB and 300GB, respectively.

Probabilistic Verifiers: Evaluating Constrained Nearest-Neighbor Queries over Uncertain Data

In applications like location-based services, sensor monitoring and biological databases, the values of the database items are inherently uncertain in nature. An important query for uncertain objects is the probabilistic nearest-neighbor query (PNN), which computes the probability of each object for being the nearest neighbor of a query point. Evaluating this query is computationally expensive, since it needs to consider the relationship among uncertain objects, and requires the use of numerical integration or Monte-Carlo methods. Sometimes, a query user may not be concerned about the exact probability values. For example, he may only need answers that have sufficiently high confidence. We thus propose the constrained nearest-neighbor query (C-PNN), which returns the IDs of objects whose probabilities are higher than some threshold, with a given error bound in the answers. The C-PNN can be answered efficiently with probabilistic verifiers. These are methods that derive the lower and upper bounds of answer probabilities, so that an object can be quickly decided on whether it should be included in the answer. We have developed three probabilistic verifiers, which can be used on uncertain data with arbitrary probability density functions. Extensive experiments were performed to examine the effectiveness of these approaches.

Casper*: Query processing for location services without compromising privacy

In this article, we present a new privacy-aware query processing framework, Capser*, in which mobile and stationary users can obtain snapshot and/or continuous location-based services without revealing their private location information. In particular, we propose a privacy-aware query processor embedded inside a location-based database server to deal with snapshot and continuous queries based on the knowledge of the users cloaked location rather than the exact location. Our proposed privacy-aware query processor is completely independent of how we compute the users cloaked location. In other words, any existing location anonymization algorithms that blur the users private location into cloaked rectilinear areas can be employed to protect the users location privacy. We first propose a privacy-aware query processor that not only supports three new privacy-aware query types, but also achieves a trade-off between query processing cost and answer optimality. Then, to improve system scalability of processing continuous privacy-aware queries, we propose a shared execution paradigm that shares query processing among a large number of continuous queries. The proposed scalable paradigm can be tuned through two parameters to trade off between system scalability and answer optimality. Experimental results show that our query processor achieves high quality snapshot and continuous location-based services while supporting queries and/or data with cloaked locations.

Hash-merge join: a non-blocking join algorithm for producing fast and early join results

We introduce the hash-merge join algorithm (HMJ, for short); a new nonblocking join algorithm that deals with data items from remote sources via unpredictable, slow, or bursty network traffic. The HMJ algorithm is designed with two goals in mind: (1) minimize the time to produce the first few results, and (2) produce join results even if the two sources of the join operator occasionally get blocked. The HMJ algorithm has two phases: The hashing phase and the merging phase. The hashing phase employs an in-memory hash-based join algorithm that produces join results as quickly as data arrives. The merging phase is responsible for producing join results if the two sources are blocked. Both phases of the HMJ algorithm are connected via a flushing policy that flushes in-memory parts into disk storage once the memory is exhausted. Experimental results show that HMJ combines the advantages of two state-of-the-art nonblocking join algorithms (XJoin and Progressive Merge Join) while avoiding their shortcomings.