Over the years, Microsoft Research Asia has fostered connections among a variety of people in the computer science and technology fields, especially by bringing together Microsoft researchers, interns, and university professors to collaborate on continuing projects. Such was the case when Microsoft Research Asia researcher Xing Xie and Osaka University Associate Professor Takahiro Hara began working together on privacy problems in 2008. Yuki Arase—then a second-year PhD student (under Hara) and Microsoft intern (under Xie)—helped bring the two together. They developed a great team chemistry, which endures to this day, as they continue to work on privacy issues related to location-based services (LBS).
Takahiro Hara, associate professor, Osaka University
LBS privacy protection is an important field for Microsoft Research and the broader computer science community, as we strive to safeguard the privacy of sensitive personal information on users’ electronic devices. The popularity of such LBS as Foursquare and Yelp, which link users to social networks, and Ingress, which provides an augmented-reality gaming platform, poses critical challenges to users’ private information. The security of this information is especially vulnerable as users use mobile devices to access cloud-based services.
Spotlight: Microsoft research newsletter
Microsoft Research Newsletter
Many past studies on location privacy preservation were based on unrealistic expectations about the user’s movement pattern, such as assuming it is known in advance or that it will follow a very simple model. Professor Hara and his collaborators have taken a more advanced approach, in which they design and deploy a protocol based on the movements of “dummy” protocol applications that follow more realistic user mobility patterns.
This method can be readily deployed on any LBS that accepts multiple requests from users, eliminating the need for a third party to preserve privacy. Nor does it require changing server programs, because they are expected to run on LBS client-side applications. And since this approach assumes a more realistic model of mobility, it can be deployed in a wider variety of LBS types.
Currently, the collaborators are working to optimize their approach in two ways. The first step is to make reactive, real-time changes in the dummy’s movements, so that they mimic the user’s mobility pattern. The second step is to generate a dummy that takes into account the user’s preferences for visiting various points of interest.
The collaborative approach works not only in research but also in education. So, for example, undergraduates at Osaka University are producing dummy protocols in collaboration with Microsoft Research. The class has workshops of three or four students who team up and log their GPS locations from smart phones when walking though campus. Students feed this logged data into the LBS-privacy application and verify the difficulty of discerning the original user’s movements from the dummy locations produced by the protocol. Students praise how this real-life application has helped them understand the concept of privacy preservation.
Screen shot of dummy-protocol application
Through the efforts of students, post-graduate interns, researchers, and professors, Microsoft Research and its academic partners help advance computer science and technology, and help supply society with much-needed, talented engineers. For example, over the past seven years, five PhD students from Professor Hara’s labs have participated in Microsoft Research internships in web mining, multimedia, and information retrieval systems. These interns spent three to ten months in Microsoft Research Asia, conducting intensive research projects under the supervision and mentorship of various Microsoft researchers, all while experiencing a different culture and forging international friendships After graduation, Microsoft interns have joined respected companies, such as Fujitsu and KDDI, as engineers and researchers, putting their collaborative training to work for society.
The professional and personal relationships created during Microsoft Research’s collaborative endeavors often influence the participants well beyond the timespan of the specific project. As Professor Shojiro Nishio, a former Osaka University vice president and director of the university’s Cybermedia Center observers, “Our long-time collaboration with Microsoft Research has made significant contributions for not only research outcomes in top-ranked journals and conferences, but also in the education of young students, many of whom are now internationally leading researchers.”
This brings us back to Yuki Arase, the student who instigated the collaborative LBS-privacy project. After working for four years as a researcher in the Natural Language Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, she is now an associate professor at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology and is co-leading a lab on big data engineering, educating the next generation of ambitious graduate students.
Professor Arase presenting at Microsoft Research Korea • Japan Academic Day
Professor Arase is thus a prime example of the fruitful chain reaction of collaboration. Her growing experience and expertise have produced continued achievements, which is precisely what we hope for from every Microsoft Research intern. As we strive to broaden the interaction between academia and Microsoft Research, we anticipate an exponential growth of such positive chain reactions resulting from our academic collaborations.
—Sean Kuno, Research Program Manager, Microsoft Research
Learn more