Colloquia / Seminars / Industry Talks

With the rapid development of mobile devices, wireless networks and Web 2.0 technology, a number of location-based social networking services (LBSNs), e.g., Foursquare, Whrrl, Facebook Place, Google Latitude, Loopt, and Brightkite, have emerged in recent years. These LBSNs allow users to establish cyber links to their friends or other users, and share tips and experiences of their visits to plentiful point-of-interests (POIs), e.g., restaurants, stores, cinema theaters, etc. Recommendation services, e.g., POI recommendation service that suggests new POIs to users in order to help them explore new places and know their cities better, are essential for LBSNs and thus receiving a lot of research interests. In this talk, I will introduce some recommendation services for LBSNs and present our research effort and results for enabling some of these recommendation services.

Wang-Chien Lee is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University, where he leads the Intelligent Pervasive Data Access (iPDA) Research Group to pursue cross-area research in database systems, pervasive/mobile computing, and networking. He is particularly interested in developing data management techniques (including accessing, routing, indexing, caching, aggregation, dissemination, and query processing) for supporting complex queries and location-based services in a wide spectrum of networking and mobile environments such as peer-to-peer networks, mobile ad-hoc networks, wireless sensor networks, and wireless broadcast systems. Meanwhile, he also works on XML, security, information integration/retrieval, and object-oriented databases. He has published more than 250 technical papers on these topics in many prestigious international conferences, such as KDD, WWW, VLDB, MOBICOM, INFOCOM, SIGIR, ICDE, MOBISYS ICNP, ICDCS, etc. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.