Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Understand

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications.

• Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy.
• However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts.
• Our work contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value.