Trajectory-based spatiotemporal entity linking is to match the same moving object in different datasets based on their movement traces. It is a fundamental step to support spatiotemporal data integration and analysis. In this paper, we study the problem of spatiotemporal entity linking using effective and concise signatures extracted from their trajectories. This linking problem is formalized as a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) query on the signatures. Four representation strategies (sequential, temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal) and two quantitative criteria (commonality and unicity) are investigated for signature construction. A simple yet effective dimension reduction strategy is developed together with a novel indexing structure called the WR-tree to speed up the search. A number of optimization methods are proposed to improve the accuracy and robustness of the linking. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art solutions in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
The debate on vaccines in Italy has greatly intensified in recent years. The promulgation of a law that makes a set of ten vaccines obligatory has pushed this formerly niche topic to a mainstream level. The law itself is an answer to the progressive erosion of the vaccine coverage. The debate has become a political topic with three main positions: supporters of the importance of vaccines, opponents who claim that vaccines are harmful to health, and the new position of those contesting only the mandatoriness of vaccinations. In this paper, we build on a Social Business Intelligence architecture to propose an in-depth analysis of the emerging social debate. Our analysis spans over more than three years, covering all the Web and social media. We adopt several techniques, including community detection and text analytics, to understand the evolution of the debate, the discussed topics, and the structure and peculiarities of the main social communities. The study reveals that the communities are well characterized, especially from a political perspective, and provides useful insights to official health organizations to improve their communication strategies.
In this study, we analyze how crop management will benefit from the Internet of Things (IoT) by providing an overview of its architecture and components from agronomic and technological perspectives. The present analysis highlights that IoT is a mature enabling technology with articulated hardware and software components. Cheap networked devices can sense crop fields at a finer grain to give timeliness warnings on the presence of stress conditions and diseases to a wider range of farmers. Cloud computing allows reliable storage, access to heterogeneous data, and machine-learning techniques for developing and deploying farm services. From this study, it emerges that the Internet of Things will draw attention to sensor quality and placement protocols, while machine learning should be oriented to produce understandable knowledge, which is also useful to enhance cropping system simulation systems.
<div>Trajectory data has become ubiquitous nowadays, which can benefit various real-world applications such as traffic management and location-based services. However, trajectories may disclose highly sensitive information of an individual including mobility patterns, personal profiles and gazetteers, social relationships, etc, making it indispensable to consider privacy protection when releasing trajectory data. Ensuring privacy on trajectories demands more than hiding single locations, since trajectories are intrinsically sparse and high-dimensional, and require to protect multi-scale correlations. To this end, extensive research has been conducted to design effective techniques for privacy-preserving trajectory data publishing. Furthermore, protecting privacy requires carefully balance two metrics: privacy and utility. In other words, it needs to protect as much privacy as possible and meanwhile guarantee the usefulness of the released trajectories for data analysis. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive study and systematic summarization of existing protection models, privacy and utility metrics for trajectories developed in the literature. We also conduct extensive experiments on a real-life public trajectory dataset to evaluate the performance of several representative privacy protection models, demonstrate the trade-off between privacy and utility, and guide the choice of the right privacy model for trajectory publishing given certain privacy and utility desiderata.</div>
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