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  1. Several "data-for-good" projects [1, 5, 12] initiated by major companies (e.g., Meta, Google) release to the public spatio-temporal datasets to benefit COVID-19 spread modeling [17, 47, 64] and understand human mobility [14, 24]. Most often, spatio-temporal data are provided in the form of snapshot high resolution population density information, where the released statistics capture population counts in small areas for short time periods. Since high resolution is required for utility (e.g., in modeling COVID hotspots) privacy risks are elevated. To prevent malicious actors from using the data to infer sensitive details about individuals, the released datasets must be first sanitized. Typically, [1, 5, 7, 12], differential privacy (DP) is employed as protection model, due to its formal protection guarantees that prevent an adversary to learn whether a particular individual's data has been included in the release or not. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 26, 2024
  2. Range aggregate queries (RAQs) are an integral part of many real-world applications, where, often, fast and approximate answers for the queries are desired. Recent work has studied answering RAQs using machine learning (ML) models, where a model of the data is learned to answer the queries. However, there is no theoretical understanding of why and when the ML based approaches perform well. Furthermore, since the ML approaches model the data, they fail to capitalize on any query specific information to improve performance in practice. In this paper, we focus on modeling "queries" rather than data and train neural networks to learn the query answers. This change of focus allows us to theoretically study our ML approach to provide a distribution and query dependent error bound for neural networks when answering RAQs. We confirm our theoretical results by developing NeuroSketch, a neural network framework to answer RAQs in practice. Extensive experimental study on real-world, TPC-benchmark and synthetic datasets show that NeuroSketch answers RAQs multiple orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art and with better accuracy. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 26, 2024
  3. Fairness in data-driven decision-making studies scenarios where individuals from certain population segments may be unfairly treated when being considered for loan or job applications, access to public resources, or other types of services. In location-based applications, decisions are based on individual whereabouts, which often correlate with sensitive attributes such as race, income, and education. While fairness has received significant attention recently, e.g., in machine learning, there is little focus on achieving fairness when dealing with location data. Due to their characteristics and specific type of processing algorithms, location data pose important fairness challenges. We introduce the concept of spatial data fairness to address the specific challenges of location data and spatial queries. We devise a novel building block to achieve fairness in the form of fair polynomials. Next, we propose two mechanisms based on fair polynomials that achieve individual spatial fairness, corresponding to two common location-based decision-making types: distance-based and zone-based. Extensive experimental results on real data show that the proposed mechanisms achieve spatial fairness without sacrificing utility. 
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  4. As countries look toward re-opening of economic activities amidst the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring public health has been challenging. While contact tracing only aims to track past activities of infected users, one path to safe reopening is to develop reliable spatiotemporal risk scores to indicate the propensity of the disease. Existing works which aim at developing risk scores either rely on compartmental model-based reproduction numbers (which assume uniform population mixing) or develop coarse-grain spatial scores based on reproduction number (R0) and macro-level density-based mobility statistics. Instead, in this article, we develop a Hawkes process-based technique to assign relatively fine-grain spatial and temporal risk scores by leveraging high-resolution mobility data based on cell-phone originated location signals. While COVID-19 risk scores also depend on a number of factors specific to an individual, including demography and existing medical conditions, the primary mode of disease transmission is via physical proximity and contact. Therefore, we focus on developing risk scores based on location density and mobility behaviour. We demonstrate the efficacy of the developed risk scores via simulation based on real-world mobility data. Our results show that fine-grain spatiotemporal risk scores based on high-resolution mobility data can provide useful insights and facilitate safe re-opening. 
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  5. Mobile apps and location-based services generate large amounts of location data. Location density information from such datasets benefits research on traffic optimization, context-aware notifications and public health (e.g., disease spread). To preserve individual privacy, one must sanitize location data, which is commonly done using differential privacy (DP). Existing methods partition the data domain into bins, add noise to each bin and publish a noisy histogram of the data. However, such simplistic modelling choices fall short of accurately capturing the useful density information in spatial datasets and yield poor accuracy. We propose a machine-learning based approach for answering range count queries on location data with DP guarantees. We focus on countering the sources of error that plague existing approaches (i.e., noise and uniformity error) through learning, and we design a neural database system that models spatial data such that density features are preserved, even when DP-compliant noise is added. We also devise a framework for effective system parameter tuning on top of public data, which helps set important system parameters without expending scarce privacy budget. Extensive experimental results on real datasets with heterogeneous characteristics show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state of the art. 
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