9a: Privacy Models and Neural Aggregation,9b: From Synthetic Mobility to Geo-Scale Foundation Models

Abstract This two-part lecture series explores both foundational concepts and state-of-the-art techniques for enabling privacy-preserving access to and utility of mobility data. We begin by motivating the importance of mobility data across domains such as urban planning, transportation, public health, and security, while highlighting the privacy risks that constrain its use. Lecture 1 focuses on protecting individual and aggregate location information, introducing key privacy models, including k-anonymity, geo-indistinguishability, and differential privacy, and presenting our deep learning–based approach for the safe release of aggregated mobility statistics. Lecture 2 turns to synthetic trajectory generation, addressing why and how to generate realistic sequences of location visits, including arrival times and durations, when raw data cannot be shared. We present a transformer-based generative model and explore its potential as a core component in geo-scale foundation models. Throughout both sessions, we bridge theory and practice, and conclude with open research challenges at the intersection of location privacy, spatiotemporal querying and modeling, and generative AI. Attendees will gain a strong foundation in location privacy concepts, practical understanding of modern methods for aggregate data release and synthetic trajectory generation, and a clear view of emerging research challenges in the field. Bio: Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Spatial Sciences; Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor of Engineering; and the director of the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. He also served as USC’s Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science from 2017 to 2022. He was co-founder of two startups, Geosemble Technologies and TallyGo, which both were acquired in July 2012 and March 2019, respectively. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California. He authored two books and more than three hundred research papers in databases, GIS, and multimedia, and he has over 14 US patents. Dr. Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as NSF, NIJ, NASA, NIH, DARPA, AFRL, IARPA, NGA, and DHS, as well as several industries such as Chevron, Cisco, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR, NGC, and Oracle. He chaired the founding nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL (2008-2011 term) and served as the chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2017-2020 term. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010 to 2013, VLDB Journal from 2009 to 2015 and PVLDB (Vol. 16) in 2023. He is on the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) editorial board and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He was the founding chair of the IEEE NetDB workshop and the general co-chair of SSTD’15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008, and 2009. He has been PC co-chair of several conferences, such as APWeb+WAIM’2017, BigComp’2016, MDM’2016, DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013, IEEE BigData 2013 and VLDB 2024. He regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, and IEEE ICDM. Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE and NAI (National Academy of Inventors). He received the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Award. He received the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2023 10-Year Impact Award in 2023. He was also a recipient of the US Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.