Mining social mobility behaviors from GPS data

The technologies of mobile communications and ubiquitous computing pervade our society, and wireless networks sense the movement of people and vehicles, generating large volumes of mobility data: location data from mobile phones, GPS tracks from mobile devices receiving geo-positions from satellites, etc. The GeoPKDD project, a large European research initiative, has studied how to discover useful knowledge about human movement behavior from mobility data, while preserving the privacy of the people under observation. A new exciting multi- disciplinary research area has thus started, at the crossroads of mobility, data mining, and privacy.