The Department of Computer Science would like to congratulate PhD students Victor Zakhary, Theodore Georgiou, Cetin Sahin, and Prof. Amr El Abbadi for 2nd Place Vision Paper at SIGSPATIAL 2017 for their paper "LocBorg: Hiding Social Media User Location while Maintaining Online Persona". Nice work!

Social media streams analysis can reveal the characteristics of people who engage with or write about different topics. Recent works show that it is possible to reveal sensitive attributes (e.g., location, gender, ethnicity, political views, etc.) of individuals by analyzing their social media streams. Although, the prediction of a user’s sensitive attributes can be used to enhance the user experience in social media, revealing some attributes like the location could represent a threat on individuals. Users can obfuscate their location by posting about random topics linked to different locations. However, posting about random and sometimes contradictory topics that are not aligned with a user’s online persona and posts could negatively affect the followers interested in her prole. This paper represents our vision about the future of user privacy on social media. Users can locally deploy a cyborg, an articial intelligent system that helps people to defend their privacy on social media. We propose LocBorg, a location privacy preserving cyborg that protects users by obfuscating their location while maintaining their online persona. LocBorg analyzes the social media streams and recommends topics to write about that are similar to a user’s topics of interest and aligned with the user’s online persona but linked to other locations.

This award is sponsored by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) under their CCC Blue Sky initiative. This year marks the 25th year of the SIGSPATIAL conference. According to the organizers, ACM SIGSPATIAL addresses issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information with a focus on algorithmic, geometric, and visual considerations. It is one of the premier conferences on geographic information systems (GIS).