Keynote Presentation

Abstract

For a long time, the market of Location-based Services (LBSs) was dominated by unspectacular restaurant finders and sightseeing guides, which suffered from low-accuracy positioning methods like Cell-Id, low data rates of 2G mobile networks, and inconvenient user interfaces. Not surprisingly, the user acceptance of such services was comparatively low, and mobile network operators and service providers very soon turned their attention towards other "killer applications" predicted by the market analysts. However, the latest market penetration of GPS-capable mobile devices as well as of appliances dedicated to car and bike navigation on the one hand, as well as the emergence of new providers offering geographic content on the other are currently shifting back the focus onto LBSs. These developments are being accompanied by the Web 2.0 paradigm, which stands for user-centricity, mesh-ups, and a broad range of community services, for example, YouTube or Facebook. Thus, when searching for location-based applications beyond navigation, it is obvious to combine the ideas of Web 2.0 with LBSs, which leads to the concept of location sharing.

Simply speaking, location sharing means that users disclose their geographic positions to other parties, which may happen in different degrees of accuracy, different modes of interactivity, and under consideration of different constraints. Location sharing can thus be used to extend existing community services in the Internet or to create entirely new ones. The presentation gives an overview of location sharing, provides a taxonomy for it, explains the underlying technologies, and identifies new functions like proactive proximity detection. However, the presentation does not only sketch the positive aspects of location sharing, but also highlights some risks in the context of  privacy. Different scenarios are presented that are sensitive with regard to a user's privacy, and the pros and cons of solutions for privacy protection are discussed.

Bio

Axel Küpper (axel.kuepper@ifi.lmu.de) received his diploma and Ph.D. in computer science from Aachen University of Technology (RWTH Aachen), Germany, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. Currently, he is with the Mobile and Distributed Systems Group of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU), Germany, where he received his postdoctoral lecture qualification (Habilitation) in 2006. In the recent years, he has been involved in several industry and research projects in the areas of superdistribution of digital content, context-aware services, and location based services. He is author of the book "Location-based Services: Fundamentals and Operation", published by John Wiley & Sons in 2005. He served as a co-chair of several IEEE workshops on mobile commerce and mobile-based software and gives lectures about mobile communications, location-based services and self-organizing networks. His special research interests are in the field of Web 2.0, mobile television, peer-to-peer applications, and ad-hoc networks.

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