Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

As the era of M-Commerce and U-Commerce finally comes, we find in surprise that our privacy is being readily compromised by unauthorized parties, spam advertisement, eavesdroppers, etc. While mutual trust cannot be easily established between end-users and mobile service providers, a compelling alternative is to expose minimum privacy that is just sufficient to receive the requested service, no more and no less. This calls for new architectures, protocols, and algorithms for existing mobile and ubiquitous services. In this talk, I will present some of our recent progress in that regard, including two-phase secure nearest neighbour search and multi-dataset location anonymization. The former is a secure protocol for nearest neighbour queries between untrusted entities. The latter is an efficient location data publishing technique that prevents unsolicited association between a user and a sensitive event, such as a medical check-up. The principles of these technologies and underlying mathematical foundations in combinational optimization and graph theory will be introduced. The algorithms will be illustrated by concrete examples. And finally, some real-life applications that employ these technologies will be demonstrated and discussed.

Dr. Haibo Hu is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a postdoctoral teaching fellow in Hong Kong Baptist University. His research interests include mobile and wireless data management, location-based services, and spatiotemporal databases. He has published 20 research papers in international conferences, journals and book chapters, including SIGMOD,VLDB,ICDE,EDBT,TKDE. He is the co-investigator of RGC/CERG grant “Semantic Location Modeling, Distance Browsing and Query Processing for Mobile Indoor Applications”. He is also the recipient of many awards, including ACM Best PhD Paper Award and Microsoft Imagine Cup.