Mobility Data Analysis: from Technical to Ethical

Motivation

Mobility data is one of the fastest growing types of data, thanks to the increasing number of mobile devices approaching the population of the globe. The collection, storage and analysis of spatio-temporal data representing trajectories of moving objects is one of the topics that received major attractions in the field of data analytics. The more semantic information is collected from various sources, the richer is movement data. This enriched mobility data is typically referred to as semantic trajectories. The analysis of such trajectories can produce powerful results in domains such as transportation, security, tourism, health, environment and even policy design. The recent COVID-19 outbreak shed a light on the importance of collecting mobility data for public health. However, at the same time, the more mobility data is enriched with semantics, the larger the risks of violating the privacy of users and of possible unethical uses of these data analysis results. Computational Ethical aspects encompass privacy, but they go beyond this, towards a more general vision of ethical gathering, processing, uses of data and the results of data analyses. How ethics interrelates with mobility data analysis is an emerging new issue.

The objective of this Dagstuhl Seminar is therefore to start a deep interacting discussion between Mobility Data Analysis researchers and Ethics experts to link these two fields with the objective of creating the foundations of a new Mobility Data Ethics research field.

The organizing team — Stan Matwin, Bettina Berendt and Chiara Renso — would be delighted to welcome you to this very special event.

This seminar, in the tradition of the Dagstuhl Seminars, promotes personal interactions and open discussions with the objective of producing joint tutorials and a vision paper. The seminar is organized in three full days that combine a "Setting the stage" session with introductory tutorials on both mobility data and ethics and a "Creating Mobility Data Ethics" session organized into small working groups discussing results, ideas, and open problems. As a first concrete step, we envisage that the Seminar will produce tutorial materials presenting each of the areas of Computing Ethics and Mobility Data Analytics, revised during the seminar based on the joint work and group discussions. Furthermore, group discussions will produce one or more short technical/vision papers that can foster discussions and initiatives to shape the new field of Mobility Data Ethics.

This seminar is nicely co-located with the Dagstuhl Seminar "Mobility Data Science" to be held from Sunday, January 9 to Friday, January 14, 2022 and organized by Mohamed Mokbel (University of Minnesota, USA), Mahmoud Sakr (Free University of Brussels, BE), Li Xiong (Emory University – Atlanta, US), Andreas Züfle (George Mason Univ. – Fairfax, US). We plan to hold shared sessions and moments of interaction. Participants will have the chance to simultaneously participate in both seminars.