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My research interest spans a wide range of areas, including mobile data management, location-based services, spatio-temporal database, and privacy-aware computing. My publication list can be found here. Funded Projects:
Query Authentication and Assurance The popularity of mobile social networking services (mSNSs) is propelling more and more businesses, especially those in retailing and marketing, into mobile and location-based forms. To address the trustworthy issue, the service providers are expected to deliver their location-based services in an authenticatable manner, so that the correctness of the service results can be verified by the client. However, existing works on query authentication cannot preserve the privacy of the data being queried, which are sensitive user locations when it comes to location-based services and mSNSs. Selected publications: H. Hu, J. Xu, Q. Chen, Z. Yang. "Authenticating Location-based Services without Compromising Privacy." Proc. of the 2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, to appear. X. Lin, J. Xu, H. Hu. "Authentication of Location-based Skyline Queries." Proc. of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '11), short paper.
Privacy-aware computing Location-based services (LBS) provide location-related information to users. However, to enjoy these LBS services the user must explicitly expose his/her accurate location to the service provider, who might abuse such information or even trade it to unauthorized parties. As public concern for privacy protection are getting stronger, we need to address the privacy issue while still maintaining good quality of services. A typical solution is location cloaking, which blurs the user location and replaces it with a cloaked region to satisfy some privacy metric like k-anonymity (at least k users share the same region so that they are indistinguishable). Selected publications: H. Hu, J. Xu, C. Ren, B. Choi. "Processing Private Queries over Untrusted Data Cloud through Privacy Homomorphism." Proc. of the 27th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '11), pp. 601 – 612. H. Hu and J. Xu. "2PASS: Bandwidth-Optimized Location Cloaking for Anonymous Location-Based Services." IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 21(10): 1458-1472, October 2010. H. Hu, J. Xu and D. L. Lee. “PAM: An Efficient and Privacy-Aware Monitoring Framework for Continuously Moving Objects.” IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering (TKDE), 22(3): 404-419, March 2010. J. Xu, X. Tang, H. Hu and J. Du. “Privacy-Conscious Location-Based Queries in Mobile Environments.” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), 21(3): 313-326, March 2010. H. Hu and J. Xu. "Non-Exposure Location Anonymity." Proc. the 25th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering (ICDE '09), Shanghai, China, pp. 1120-1131.
Mobile data management Portable and ubiquitous devices are changing our way of working, living and entertaining at an ever-increasing rate. So are they revealing the paradigm for future computing: autonomous devices interacting with servers, agents and peers. This new paradigm, however, poses tremendous challenges to our research community due to the large population, continuous movement, vulnerable network connectivity and bandwidth, scarce battery power, and limited screen size of these devices. While a huge body of research effort has been devoted to addressing the communication/networking aspect, especially at media access control and routing layer, less effort has been expended at the application layer to effectively manage resources and data. My research mostly falls in the category of context-aware data management, particularly in location-based services, which is one of the most distinguishing features in this new paradigm. Selected publications: H. Hu and D. L. Lee. “Distance Indexing on Road Networks” Proc. of the 32th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Seoul, Korea, 2006, pp. 894-905. H. Hu, D. L. Lee and J. Xu. “Fast Nearest Neighbor Search on Road Networks” Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Munich, Germany, 2006, pp. 186-203. H. Hu, J. Xu, W. S. Wong, B. Zheng and D. L. Lee. "Proactive Caching for Spatial Queries in Mobile Environments." Proc. of the 21th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '05), Tokyo, Japan, pp. 403-414.
Spatio-temporal database Spatio-temporal database has numerous applications in mobile and scientific computing. However, the efficient processing of various types of queries, in particular when the temporal factor is involved, is still a challenging and yet interesting topic. A handful techniques, such as indexing, caching, shared execution, can be leveraged. Another interesting topic in spatio-temporal database is continuous query monitoring, where the result change of a large number of queries need to be reported to interested parties in real-time. Selected publications: 1. X. Lin, J. Xu, and H. Hu. "Range-based Skyline Queries in Mobile Environments." IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), to appear, 2011. H. Hu, J. Xu and D. L. Lee. “A Generic Framework for Monitoring Continuous Spatial Queries over Moving Objects” Proc. of the 24th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Baltimore, Maryland, 2005, pp. 479-490. H. Hu and D. L. Lee. "Range Nearest Neighbor Search." IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering (TKDE), Volume 18, Number 1, 2006.
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