The Chair of Practical IT Security (Prof. Strufe, KASTEL) has a hiwijob opening in the research area Behavioral Privacy. Applicants should be interested in "Trajectory Data" and have programming skills in Python (or a similar language).

Research Topic:

Motivation

The value of and interest into trajectory data are increasingly apparent. Traffic management, urban planning, and routing advice are just a few of their many applications.Yet, it entails extensive privacy risk, as trajectory data is extremely privacyinvasive. Unfortunately, several conditions complicate the anonymization of trajectory data: They are sequential, high‐dimensional, bound to geophysical restrictions, and easily mapped to semantic POIs.

Research Problem

Differential Privacy has been considered as a great privacy metric due to its strong mathematical background and good properties. However, the aforementioned intrinsic properties of trajectories make the design of DP mechanisms a particularly difficult task in this setting. In this project, we aim to use the publicly available road network and its graph structure to improve the overall utility of our privacy mechanisms.

Tasks of the position

As part of a team of researchers, your task will consist of, but is not limited to extract the graph structure of a city map using OpenStreetMap

(https://www.openstreetmap.org) and NetworkX python library

(https://networkx.org).

Transform trajectory database into a graph database using NetworkX python library.

Implement trajectory anonymizing mechanism into code.

Implement evaluation and utility metrics. Run experiments with real‐worlddatabases.

Possible extension to Bachelor’s/Master’s Thesis

This project can be preparatory work for a potential thesis topic. The precisetopic is up for discussion based on the student’s preferences.

Application & Questions

If you are interested or have further questions, please contact:

Patricia Guerra‐Balboa (Ph.D. Student in Behavioral Privacy)

patricia.balboa@kit.edu

Room 255 Building 50.34

Chair of IT Security

https://ps.tm.kit.edu