Learning significant user locations with GPS and GSM

This thesis addresses the tasks of place discovery and place recognition - learning and recognizing places significant to a user - by analyzing GPS location and GSM cell tower data collected from the user's mobile phone. Location provides valuable context into the user's environment, and place-discovery and recognition algorithms enable human-centric systems to communicate with the user in human terms. In this thesis, we introduce a novel two-phased approach to place-discovery and recognition that combines the advantages of GPS and GSM cell data. We design and implement a system that produces a compact travel summary from the user's daily GPS logs. We then use computational geometry to investigate the aspect ratios of GSM cell coverage polygons as an optimization to place recognition. Finally, we conclude by presenting a one-month empirical study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our two-phased approach, and identify a set of anomalies in our experiment that can direct further development of place-discovery systems.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Yu, Xiao, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Larry Rudolph.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/42121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/42121