Mobile Social Media and Demographics: Opportunities and Risks

Prof. Augustin Chaintreau, Columbia University
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~augustin/

(joint works with Chris Riederer, Sebastien Zimmeck and Steven Bellovin)

Traditionally, science leverages data about individuals using a data-set collected inside the boundaries of a single domain. But this is at odds with how millions everyday produce public information. Multiple mobile services and social media accounts record information, however sporadically, about the same person whereabouts, be it her GPS coordinates or the URLs of her clickstream. Reconciling users data across domains and exploiting their individual features carry arguably one of Big Data's most fascinating opportunities - and some of its most daunting risks.

In this talk, we present the first effort to conduct demographic analysis of urban mobility with open reproducible data. We discuss the opportunities from crowdsourcing and algorithmic inference to scale and enrich the census, with a special emphasis on sharing lessons learned about limitations, systematic bias and privacy risks. We argue that a comprehensive set of tools, requiring collaboration between computational and social scientist, are urgently needed to guard us against the privacy and fairness concern of Big Data disparate impact.

Bio:
Augustin is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University since 2010, where he directs the Mobile Social Lab. The goal of his research is to reconcile the benefits of leveraging personal data and social networks with a commitment to fairness and privacy. His latest results address transparency in personalization, the role of human mobility in privacy across several domains, the efficiency of crowdsourced content curation, the fairness of incentives to share personal data. His research lead to 25 papers in tier-1 conferences (five receiving best or best student paper awards at ACM CoNEXT, SIGMETRICS, USENIX IMC, IEEE MASS, Algotel), covered by several media including the NYT blog, The Washington Post, the Economist, or The Guardian. An ex student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he earned a Ph.D in mathematics and computer science in 2006, a NSF CAREER Award in 2013 and the ACM SIGMETRICS Rising star award in 2013. He has been an active member of network and web research community, organizing the upcoming Data Transparency Lab Conference, serving in the program committees of ACM SIGMETRICS (as chair), SIGCOMM, WWW, CoNEXT (as chair), MobiCom, MobiHoc, IMC, WSDM, WWW, COSN, AAAI ICWSM, and IEEE Infocom, and as area editor for IEEE TMC, ACM SIGCOMM CCR, and ACM SIGMOBILE MC2R.