Social Mobile Applications, Location, Privacy and the Capital of Nevada

In this talk, I’ll discuss a research trajectory that we have been pursuing at Intel Research Seattle. This trajectory is «social, mobile applications» or, perhaps more colloquially, «applications that don’t support a specific work task and can be used just about anywhere.» I’ll talk through what this area of research is, the context of the work at Intel Research Seattle into large-scale location systems, and some experiments we have done, are doing, and are planning to do. A significant portion of the talk will be dedicated to the privacy issues that come up (or don’t come up) as one deploys location-aware applications to mobile platforms people use in their daily lives.