Wang-Chien Lee

Bio: Wang-Chien Lee is an academic researcher from Pennsylvania State University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Wireless sensor network & Nearest neighbor search. The author has an hindex of 60, co-authored 366 publications receiving 14123 citations. Previous affiliations of Wang-Chien Lee include Ohio State University & Verizon Communications.

Collaborative Spatial Object Recommendation in Location Based Services

Abstract: Recommendation systems have found their ways into many on-line web applications, e.g., product recommendation on Amazon and movie recommendation on Netflix. Particularly, collaborative filtering techniques have been widely used in these systems to personalize the recommendations according to the needs and tastes of users. In this paper, we apply collaborative filtering in spatial object recommendation which is essential in many location based services. Due to the large number of spatial objects and participating users, using collaborative filtering to obtain recommendations for a particular user can be very expensive. However, we observe that users tend to have affinity for some regions and argue that using users with similar regional bias in recommendation may help in reducing the search space of similar users. Thus, we propose two techniques, namely, Access Minimum Bounding Rectangle Overlapped Area (AMBROA) and Grid Division Cosine Similarity (GDCS), to form regions of interests that represent user location interests and activities and to find users with local access similarity to facilitate effective spatial object recommendation. We conduct an extensive performance evaluation to validate our ideas. Evaluation result demonstrates the superiority of our proposal over the conventional approach.

Querying Optimal Routes for Group Meetup

Abstract: Motivated by location-based social networks which allow people to access location-based services as a group, we study a novel variant of optimal sequenced route (OSR) queries, optimal sequenced route for group meetup (OSR-G) queries. OSR-G query aims to find the optimal meeting POI (point of interest) such that the maximum users’ route distance to the meeting POI is minimized after each user visits a number of POIs of specific categories (e.g., gas stations, restaurants, and shopping malls) in a particular order. To process OSR-G queries, we first propose an OSR-Based (OSRB) algorithm as our baseline, which examines every POI in the meeting category and utilizes existing OSR (called E-OSR) algorithm to compute the optimal route for each user to the meeting POI. To address the shortcomings (i.e., requiring to examine every POI in the meeting category) of OSRB, we propose an upper bound based filtering algorithm, called circle filtering (CF) algorithm, which exploits the circle property to filter the unpromising meeting POIs. In addition, we propose a lower bound based pruning (LBP) algorithm, namely LBP-SP which exploits a shortest path lower bound to prune the unqualified meeting POIs to reduce the search space. Furthermore, we develop an approximate algorithm, namely APS, to accelerate OSR-G queries with a good approximation ratio. Finally the experimental results show that both CF and LBP-SP outperform the OSRB algorithm and have high pruning rates. Moreover, the proposed approximate algorithm runs faster than the exact OSR-G algorithms and has a good approximation ratio.

Efficient valid scope computation for location-dependent spatial queries in mobile and wireless environments

Abstract: In mobile and wireless environments, mobile clients can access information with respect to their locations by submitting Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Owing to scarce wireless channel bandwidth and limited client battery life, frequent LDSQ submission from clients must be avoided. Observing that LDSQs issued from similar client positions would normally return the same results, we explore the idea of valid scope, that represents a spatial area in which a set of LDSQs will retrieve exactly the same query results. With a valid scope derived and an LDSQ result cached at the client side, a client can assert whether the new LDSQs can be answered with the maintained LDSQ result, thus eliminating the LDSQs sent to the server. As such, contention on wireless channel and client energy consumed for data transmission can be considerably reduced. In this paper, we design efficient algorithms to compute the valid scope for common types of LDSQs, including nearest neighbor queries and range queries. Through an extensive set of experiments, our proposed valid scope computation algorithms are shown to significantly outperform existing approaches.

Data management in location-dependent information services

Abstract: Location-dependent information services (LDISs) answer queries in accordance with the locations the queries are associated with (e.g., the locations from which the queries are issued. The emergence of LDISs is resulted from the convergence of high-speed wireless networks, personal portable devices, and locatining techniques. LDISs have a variety of promising applications, such as local information access (e.g., traffic reports, news, and navigation maps) and nearest neighbor queries (e.g., finding the nearest restaurant), and are expected to become an integral part of our daily life. This seminar will provide background and an overview of research on location-dependent information access in mobile and pervasive environments. In particular, it will discuss the following topic areas:

Querying Uncertain Minimum in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce two types of probabilistic aggregation queries, namely, Probabilistic Minimum Value Queries (PMVQ)s and Probabilistic Minimum Node Queries (PMNQ)s. A PMVQ determines possible minimum values among all imprecise sensed data, while a PMNQ identifies sensor nodes that possibly provide minimum values. However, centralized approaches incur a lot of energy from battery-powered sensor nodes and well-studied in-network aggregation techniques that presume precise sensed data are not practical to inherently imprecise sensed data. Thus, to answer PMVQs and PMNQs energy-efficiently, we devised suites of in-network algorithms. For PMVQs, our in-network minimum value screening algorithm (MVS) filters candidate minimum values; and our in-network minimum value aggregation algorithm (MVA) conducts in-network probability calculation. PMNQs requires possible minimum values to be determined a prior, inevitably consuming more energy to evaluate than PMVQs. Accordingly, our one-phase and two-phase in-network algorithms are devised. We also extend the algorithms to answer PMNQ variants. We evaluate all our proposed approaches through cost analysis and simulations.

Friendship and mobility: user movement in location-based social networks

Abstract: Even though human movement and mobility patterns have a high degree of freedom and variation, they also exhibit structural patterns due to geographic and social constraints. Using cell phone location data, as well as data from two online location-based social networks, we aim to understand what basic laws govern human motion and dynamics. We find that humans experience a combination of periodic movement that is geographically limited and seemingly random jumps correlated with their social networks. Short-ranged travel is periodic both spatially and temporally and not effected by the social network structure, while long-distance travel is more influenced by social network ties. We show that social relationships can explain about 10% to 30% of all human movement, while periodic behavior explains 50% to 70%. Based on our findings, we develop a model of human mobility that combines periodic short range movements with travel due to the social network structure. We show that our model reliably predicts the locations and dynamics of future human movement and gives an order of magnitude better performance than present models of human mobility.

Temporal Networks

Abstract: A great variety of systems in nature, society and technology -- from the web of sexual contacts to the Internet, from the nervous system to power grids -- can be modeled as graphs of vertices coupled by edges The network structure, describing how the graph is wired, helps us understand, predict and optimize the behavior of dynamical systems In many cases, however, the edges are not continuously active As an example, in networks of communication via email, text messages, or phone calls, edges represent sequences of instantaneous or practically instantaneous contacts In some cases, edges are active for non-negligible periods of time: eg, the proximity patterns of inpatients at hospitals can be represented by a graph where an edge between two individuals is on throughout the time they are at the same ward Like network topology, the temporal structure of edge activations can affect dynamics of systems interacting through the network, from disease contagion on the network of patients to information diffusion over an e-mail network In this review, we present the emergent field of temporal networks, and discuss methods for analyzing topological and temporal structure and models for elucidating their relation to the behavior of dynamical systems In the light of traditional network theory, one can see this framework as moving the information of when things happen from the dynamical system on the network, to the network itself Since fundamental properties, such as the transitivity of edges, do not necessarily hold in temporal networks, many of these methods need to be quite different from those for static networks