CS SEMINAR

Tracking your every move - today and tomorrow

Speaker
Associate Professor Jakob Eriksson
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois
Chicago

Chaired by
Dr CHAN Mun Choon, Professor, School of Computing
chanmc@comp.nus.edu.sg

25 Aug 2015 Tuesday, 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

SR7, COM1-02-07

Abstract:

Not too long ago, tracking the movements of individuals was an obscure activity largely reserved for detective novels and the occasional creepy stalker. Lately, however, massive-scale continuous location surveillance has quietly become a fact of life, pursued by organizations as diverse as Google, Amazon, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. Department of Transportation, not to mention cyber-criminals, jealous spouses and helicopter parents. An equally wide range of technologies is used for this virtual stakeout job, including spyware on your laptop and mobile devices, roadside radio receivers (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and more), license plate reading devices, face-recognizing surveillance cameras, RFID tags and readers, and more.

In this talk, we will review some of the more pervasive people-tracking methods in use today, together with related techniques and more (or less) well-known uses. We'll then put on a pair of decidedly rose-colored glasses, and try to see what good our Orwellian future may bring, and what challenges lie ahead, beyond the quaint notion of protecting your location privacy.


Biodata:

Jakob Eriksson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to that, he did a two year stint at MIT CSAIL as a postdoc, received his Ph.D. at UC Riverside, and his undergraduate degree at the Royal Institute of Technology(KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests include mobile computing, operating systems, and computer vision.