CheckInside: A Fine-grained Indoor Location-based Social Network

Google Tech Talk November 19, 2014 Presented by Moustafa Youssef ABSTRACT Existing location-based social networks (LBSNs), e.g. Foursquare, depend mainly on GPS or network-based localization to infer users’ locations. However, GPS is unavailable indoors and network-based localization provides coarse-grained accuracy. This limits the accuracy of current LBSNs in indoor environments, where people spend 89% of their time. This in turn affects the user experience, in terms of the accuracy of the ranked list of venues, especially for the small screens of mobile devices; misses business opportunities; and leads to reduced venues coverage. In this talk, we present CheckInside: a system that can provide a fine-grained indoor location-based social network. CheckInside leverages the crowd-sensed data collected from users’ mobile devices during the check-in operation and knowledge extracted from current LBSNs to associate a place with its name and semantic fingerprint. This semantic fingerprint is used to obtain a more accurate list of nearby places as well as automatically detect new places with similar signatures. A novel algorithm for handling incorrect check-ins and inferring a semantically-enriched floorplan is proposed as well as an algorithm for enhancing the system performance based on the user implicit feedback. Evaluation of CheckInside in four malls over the course of six weeks with 20 participants shows that it can provide the actual user location within the top five venues 99% of the time. This is compared to 17% only in the case of current LBSNs. In addition, it can increase the coverage of current LBSNs by more than 25%. Speaker Info: Moustafa Youssef is an Associate Professor at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (EJUST) and Director of the Wireless Research Center, Egypt. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from University of Maryland, USA in 2004 and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science and engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt in 1997 and 1999 respectively. His research interests include mobile wireless networks, mobile computing, location determination technologies, pervasive computing, and network security. He has twelve issued and pending patents. He is an associate editor for the ACM TSAS, an area editor of the ACM MC2R and served on the organizing and technical committees of numerous conferences. Dr. Youssef is the recipient of the 2003 University of Maryland Invention of the Year award, the 2010 joint TWAS-AAS-Microsoft Award for Young Scientists, the 2012 Egyptian State Award, the 2014 COMESA Innovation Award, among others. He is also an ACM Distinguished Speaker.