ISP-Enabled Behavioral Ad Targeting without User Consent (and Beyond)

June 11, 2009
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic | Northwestern University

In this talk, accessible to everyone, I will present ongoing research projects from the Northwestern Networks Group. In the first part of the talk, I will explain how you can use search engines to accurately classify Internet endpoints. Next, I will talk about the ISP-enabled behavioral ad targeting problem. In particular, I will explain how it is possible to extract user browsing patterns without violating wiretap laws which explicitly prohibit intercepting the contents of communication. In the second part of the talk, I will present our recent work on ‘serendipitous’ location-based services, i.e., those that foster accidental discovery of people, businesses and other locations around users that match their interests. I will particularly focus on characterizing the relationship between people’s application interests and mobility properties that we found by studying a population of over 280,000 users of a 3G mobile network in a large metropolitan area. Finally, I will briefly present our initial efforts on designing an infrastructure-less indoor positioning system.

Speaker Details

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at Northwestern University. His research interests are in the area of computer networking with emphasis on design, measurements, analysis, denial-of-service resiliency, and prototype implementation of protocols and algorithms for the Internet. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 2005 after receiving a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University, under the direction of Prof. Ed Knightly. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2008.