Tomorrow, Thursday, January 21st, Gabriella Cohen will present her Masters thesis, titled “ Analyzing Human Mobility Patterns with Zero-Knowledge Routine Diaries”, advised by Eran and Irad Ben-Gal. The talk will take place at room 206, Wolfson building, at Tel Aviv University. Here is what the thesis is about:

Abstract:
Mobile devices have become an integral part of day-to-day life. Since most devices have location positioning technology such as GPS or cellular positioning, a large amount of location data is obtained per user, which generates a continuous and frequent location-sampling of a user. When aggregated together the location data can be used to draw a detailed trajectory of a user: movement patterns, locations visited and the times of the visits.
Human Mobility Patterns hold a tremendous amount of inferred information regarding a user's daily routine, their socioeconomic status, life style, gender, family status, occupation, hobbies etc. Characterizing users using their typical movement patterns can be of great value for many applications, such as marketing and advertising, forecasting the dynamics of crowds, infrastructure and transportation planning, traffic control, smart-home, and social applications. 
In this talk I will present and end-to-end model for extracting single-user mobility patterns, both geographic and inferred-semantic routines. I then use all single-users' trajectories to extract mobility pattern clusters and characterize the profile of users that belong to each cluster. Using cellular raw data of 5,000 anonymous users, and no other source of data nor external information, the model identifies both geographical clusters and inferred-semantic clusters of Human Mobility Patterns.