Uncategorized – Platial Analysis Lab

MixMap presentation at AutoCarto 2022

December 30, 2022

The video of co-author Sarah Battersby (Tableau Research) presenting our MixMap AutoCarto paper is available online…

New paper commenting on the state of POI research

July 2, 2022

Prof McKenzie and colleagues provides an overview of the state of the art and challenges facing research on this topic…

Welcome Priyanka and Elodie

September 14, 2021

We are very excited to welcome two new team members to the Platial Analysis Lab. Priyanka Verma and Elodie Ithier…

Congratulations Honours Students Emily and Jonah

May 18, 2021

Congratulations to Emily Chen and Jonah Levitt on completing their honours theses. Check out there work here…

The Environmental Impact of Micro-mobility Services

December 16, 2019

Given the recent discussions surrounding the environmental impact of new e-scooters, I thought I would do a quick comparison of emissions…

New lab member – Hongyu Zhang

September 3, 2019

As the new academic year gets under way, we would like to welcome a new doctoral student member to the Platial Analysis Lab team…

Montreal Building Footprints

March 8, 2019

Microsoft just recently published their Building Footprints dataset for Canada. A quick analysis of the coverage for the Island of Montreal shows that there are considerable differences…

Join the Lab! Masters and PhD Opportunities

November 9, 2018

The Platial Analysis Lab is currently accepting applications for funded graduate research from motivated students at the Masters and PhD levels.

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