Towards Privacy-Preserving and Secure Mobile Crowd Sensing

When: Friday, April 7, 2017
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM – Noon

Speaker: Prof. Ming Li, University of Nevada, Reno

Host: Dr. Omprakash Gnawali

Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) arises as a new sensing paradigm based on the power of the crowd which consists of various mobile devices, such as smartphones and wearable devices. Equipped with multiple sensors, from GPS to camera, and paired with the inherent mobility of their owners, mobile devices are capable of acquiring diverse information of surrounding environment. By fusing and analyzing their multi-dimensional sensing data, MCS has potential to accelerate the maturity of smart health caring, environment monitoring, traffic surveillance, social event observation, etc. Although with all these promising visions, the wide adoption of MCS is largely hindered by its privacy and security concerns. The main challenge is how to achieve these two goals without sacrificing MCS performance accuracy and efficiency. In this talk, I will present my recent research on protecting privacy and security in MCS. In the first part, I will discuss how to realize privacy-preserving data aggregation and analysis with the consideration of data imperfection at sensing participants and computation inaccuracy at the MCS platform. In the second part, I will present schemes on protecting sensing participants’ private information, such as locations and sensing preferences, during sensing task scheduling. I will conclude with a brief discussion of my future research plans.

Bio:

Ming Li is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Mississippi State University in 2014, M.E. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2010, and B.E. degree from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2007. Her research lies in addressing security, privacy, and resource allocation issues in emerging wireless networks and systems. She has published articles at top venues in her areas of interest, such as INFOCOM, ICDCS, IEEE Transactions of Mobile Computing, and IEEE Transactions of Parallel and Distributed Systems. She is also the co-recipient of Best Paper Award of Globecom 2015.