In an era of GPS traces

In an era of a proliferation of GPS devices, family members can track each other as they are moving around on a minute to minute basis. In an era of a proliferation of communication technologies, the whole world is becoming a big family. Would the world's big family track its own members? In an era where cell phones, cars, cameras, portable devices and probably key chains and pencils may have GPS devices; are we going to develop location-intelligent software that reasons about the collected GPS traces? This talk discusses the utilization of GPS traces at various scales starting from logging a "single" person's own GPS trace and up to collecting huge amounts of GPS traces from a "crowd" of objects. This talk elaborates on how software can reason about GPS traces starting from applications that we use on a daily basis, e.g., email clients and calendars, and up to complex systems for data analysis and response. This talk oscillates between the pros and cons of collecting GPS traces, exploits the associated opportunities and highlights the inevitable risks. Finally, this talk addresses the industrial interest and the research trend in collecting, handling, processing and enriching GPS traces.