COVID19 – Platial Analysis Lab

Regional variation in place visit behavior during a global pandemic

December 24, 2021

In a recent paper, Prof. McKenzie and colleague investigate how visits to places across the United States have changed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic…

Countries vary in place-based activity response to COVID-19 policies

May 18, 2020

We recently published a paper comparing countries based on the relationship between place-based activity patterns and government enacted policy…

Country Comparison for COVID-19 Community Mobility Response

April 11, 2020

We developed another data visualization portal for comparing country community mobility responses to COVID-19…

Interactive Graph of Canada’s COVID-19 Community Mobility

April 7, 2020

We parsed Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility PDF for Canada in order to better compare and visualize the data…

Brunila, Mikael; LaViolette, Jack; CH-Wang, Sky; Verma, Priyanka; Féré, Clara; McKenzie, Grant

Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City Proceedings Article Forthcoming

In: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP2023), Forthcoming.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

McKenzie, Grant; Zhang, Hongyu

Platial k-anonymity: Improving location anonymity through temporal popularity signatures Best Paper Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik, 2023, ISSN: 1868-8969.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

@inproceedings{McKenzie2023b,

title = {Platial k-anonymity: Improving location anonymity through temporal popularity signatures},

author = {Grant McKenzie and Hongyu Zhang },

url = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2023/18904/},

issn = {1868-8969},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-08-31},

urldate = {2023-08-31},

booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science},

volume = {277},

publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik},

series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},

abstract = {While it is increasingly necessary in today's digital society, sharing personal location information comes at a cost.  Sharing one's precise place of interest, e.g., Compass Coffee, enables a range of location-based services, but substantially reduces the individual's privacy.  Methods have been developed to obfuscate and anonymize location data while still maintaining a degree of utility.  One such approach, spatial k-anonymity, aims to ensure an individual's level of anonymity by reporting their location as a set of k potential locations rather than their actual location alone.  Larger values of k increase spatial anonymity while decreasing the utility of the location information.  Typical examples of spatial k-anonymized datasets present elements as simple geographic points with no attributes or contextual information.  In this work, we demonstrate that the addition of publicly available contextual data can significantly reduce the anonymity of a k-anonymized dataset.  Through the analysis of place type temporal visitation patterns, hours of operation, and popularity values, one's anonymity can decreased by more than 50 percent.  We propose a platial k-anonymity approach that leverages a combination of temporal popularity signatures and report the amount that k must increase in order to maintain a certain level of anonymity. Finally, a method for reporting platial k-anonymous regions is presented and the implications of our methods are discussed.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {inproceedings}

}

Qiang, Dan; McKenzie, Grant

Mobility Vitality: Assessing Neighborhood Similarity Through Transportation Patterns In New York City Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik, 2023.

Abstract | BibTeX

Brunila, Mikael; Verma, Priyanka; McKenzie, Grant

When Everything Is "Nearby": How Airbnb Listings in New York City Exaggerate Proximity Proceedings Article

In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik, 2023.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX