Location Privacy Workshop (LPW) 2020

@ ARES 2020 - University College Dublin, Ireland - August 28, 2020

NEWS:
17/08/2020 ‒ The program and list of accepted papers are now online. Our keynote speaker will be Prof. Gabriel Ghinita, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.
30/04/2020 ‒ The paper submission deadline has been extended to May 17.
23/04/2020 ‒ Covid-19 pandemic update (2): in agreement with ARES organisers, it has been decided that LPW (and ARES) 2020 will be a virtual, all-digital event. More informations for authors are available in the submission page. Please continue submitting your papers! ARES proceedings (including LPW papers) will be published by ACM ICPS as normal.
06/04/2020 ‒ Covid-19 pandemic update (1): removed as obsolete - see above.
04/03/2019 ‒ Paper submission is now open. Deadline: 01/05/2020
06/02/2020 ‒ The Call for Papers for LPW 2020 has been announced.

LPW 2020 ‒ The Second Location Privacy Workshop

Location and mobility data are highly sensitive, as they can be used to infer a number of other personal and sensitive data on an individual. However, human mobility is highly predictable, and location information is routinely collected by location-aware devices (e.g. smartphones), connected vehicles and smart transportation systems, e-tolling, and cameras with face recognition among others.

Location privacy is a rapidly developing research area, and the second Location Privacy Workshop (LPW 2020) provides a platform for original research and discussion on all technical aspects of privacy and security of location-based services.

ACM ICPS

Accepted papers will appear in the main conference proceedings (ARES 2020), published by ACM on the International Conference Proceedings Series (ACM ICPS). They will be available on the ACM digital library indexed by Scopus, dblp, etc.

ACM

Topics of interest

  • Security of location-aware mobile devices
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies for location-based services
  • Privacy and anonymity in (public) transportation systems
  • Privacy in connected autonomous vehicles
  • Security of smart mobility applications
  • Privacy in location-aware social media
  • Privacy in position-based advertising
  • Malicious and pervasive tracking, de-anonymization
  • Cryptographic protocols and schemes for location information
  • Data structures for location information
  • Security and reliability of positioning systems
  • Location verification and authentication
  • Location forensics
  • Data protection techniques for regulatory (GDPR) compliance
  •  Updated  Privacy in location-based contact tracing
  • …and any other related topic

Call for Papers

The Call for Papers is available for download:

PDF file

TXT file

Feel free to distribute it!

Submission

UPDATE: We recently discussed with the ARES conference organisers the current Covid-19 pandemic, and we agreed to switch to an all-digital, virtual workshop. Authors of accepted papers will be asked to submit a recorded presentation of their papers, and will be asked to be online at the scheduled workshop time to answer questions. We will add more details on the digital delivery of the workshop soon. Publication of accepted paper in the ACM digital library is confirmed.

Perspective authors are invited to submit novel contributions, application papers and case studies. Submission should be 6-8 pages in the double-column ACM conference format (template below). Submissions must be anonymous with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. Submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, presentation and clarity of exposition.

All accepted papers will be published on the ACM digital library alongside the main conference proceedings, and indexed in Scopus, dblp, etc.

At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for the ARES 2020 conference. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference.

Submissions are accepted through EasyChair (select track LPW 2020):
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ares2020

Submitted paper must adhere to the ACM SigConf template: LaTeX (recommended), Word.

Program Chairs

  • Paolo Palmieri ‒
    University College Cork, Ireland
  • Luca Calderoni ‒
    Università di Bologna, Italy

Program Committee

  • Antoine Boutet ‒ INSA de Lyon, France
  • Zekeriya Erkin ‒ Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  • Sébastien Gambs ‒ Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
  • Prosanta Gope - University of Sheffield, UK
  • Kévin Huguenin ‒ Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Kimmo Järvinen ‒ University of Helsinki, Finland
  • Ioannis Krontiris ‒ Huawei European Research Center, Germany
  • Jun Pang ‒ University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
  • Raúl Pardo - IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Constantinos Patsakis ‒ University of Piraeus, Greece
  • Francesco Regazzoni ‒ University of Lugano, Switzerland
  • Julián Salas Piñón - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
  • Michael Solomon ‒ University of Cumberlands, USA
  • George Theodorakopoulos ‒ Cardiff University, United Kingdom
  • Rolando Trujillo Rasúa ‒ Deakin University, Australia

Important dates

All deadlines are at 23:59 Anywhere On Earth (AOE).

  • Submission deadline: May 1, 2020 May 17, 2020 (extended)
  • Authors notification: June 12, 2020
  • Camera-Ready Papers Due: June 19, 2020
  • Workshop day: August 28, 2020

Program

Session IChair: Paolo Palmieri
KeynoteGabriel Ghinita"An Overview of Research Directions for Protecting Privacy of Location Data"
Paper 1Jana Medková"Anonymization of geosocial network data by the (k,l)-degree method with location entropy edge selection"
Paper 2Jack Fitzsimons, Atul Mantri, Robert Pisarczyk, Tom Rainforth and Zhikuan Zhao"A note on blind contact tracing at scale with applications to the COVID-19 pandemic"

Please refer to the full ARES program for details on times and how to connect.



Keynote

An Overview of Research Directions for Protecting Privacy of Location Data

Prof. Gabriel Ghinita, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

The use of location data has become ubiquitous, given the emergence of mobile apps in the past decade. Numerous services rely on location data to provide customized service to their users. While the benefits of using such data for location-based services, recommender systems or healthcare apps are clear, there are also concerns with respect to protecting individual privacy. Disclosing location traces to an untrusted service can lead to serious privacy violations.
This talk will explore the latest research directions and trends in protecting the privacy of location data. We will investigate three main categories of approaches: (1) differential privacy for releasing statistics on user whereabouts; (2) geo-indistinguishability for location perturbation in online services; and (3) techniques for processing on encrypted location data. These three approaches offer interesting trade-offs with respect to data accuracy, performance, and the nature of data access supported (i.e., aggregate data access vs individual location data use).

Dr. Gabriel Ghinita is an Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts, Boston. During the 2018/19 academic year, he spent one year as a Visiting Associate Professor at University of Southern California. Prior to joining UMB in Fall 2011, he was a Research Associate at the Purdue Cyber Center and Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS).
Dr. Ghinita's research focuses on information security and privacy, with emphasis on protecting location data. His 2008 work published in ACM SIGMOD 2008 was the first to support practical nearest-neighbor queries with cryptographic-strength protection, and has more than 900 citations to date (according to Google Scholar). His research work on protecting location privacy received an Outstanding Paper Award at the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2009 conference, and a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2014 ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY).

Venue

LWP is co-located with ARES 2020, and will be held at University College Dublin, Ireland. Please refer to the main conference website for more information.