OBJECTIVES: To understand the landscape of privacy preserving record linkage (PPRL) applications in public health, assess estimates of PPRL accuracy and privacy, and evaluate factors for PPRL adoption. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A literature scan examined the accuracy, data privacy, and scalability of PPRL in public health. Twelve interviews with subject matter experts were conducted and coded using an inductive approach to identify factors related to PPRL adoption. RESULTS: PPRL has a high level of linkage quality and accuracy. PPRL linkage quality was comparable to that of clear text linkage methods (requiring direct personally identifiable information [PII]) for linkage across various settings and research questions. Accuracy of PPRL depended on several components, such as PPRL technique, and the proportion of missingness and errors in underlying data. Strategies to increase adoption include increasing understanding of PPRL, improving data owner buy-in, establishing governance structure and oversight, and developing a public health implementation strategy for PPRL. DISCUSSION: PPRL protects privacy by eliminating the need to share PII for linkage, but the accuracy and linkage quality depend on factors including the choice of PPRL technique and specific PII used to create encrypted identifiers. Large-scale implementations of PPRL linking millions of observations-including PCORnet, National Institutes for Health N3C, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 project have demonstrated the scalability of PPRL for public health applications. CONCLUSIONS: Applications of PPRL in public health have demonstrated their value for the public health community. Although gaps must be addressed before wide implementation, PPRL is a promising solution to data linkage challenges faced by the public health ecosystem.

While location-based services are already well established in outdoor scenarios, they are still not available in indoor environments. The reason for this can be found in two open problems: First, there is still no off-the-shelf indoor positioning system for mobile devices and, second, indoor maps are not publicly available for most buildings. While there is an extensive body of work on the first problem, the efficient creation of indoor maps remains an open challenge. We tackle the indoor mapping challenge in our MapGENIE approach that automatically derives indoor maps from traces collected by pedestrians moving around in a building. Since the trace data is collected in the background from the pedestrians' mobile devices, MapGENIE avoids the labor-intensive task of traditional indoor map creation and increases the efficiency of indoor mapping. To enhance the map building process, MapGENIE leverages exterior information about the building and uses grammars to encode structural information about the building. Hence, in contrast to existing work, our approach works without any user interaction and only needs a small amount of traces to derive the indoor map of a building. To demonstrate the performance of MapGENIE, we implemented our system using Android and a foot-mounted IMU to collect traces from volunteers. We show that using our grammar approach, compared to a purely trace-based approach we can identify up to four times as many rooms in a building while at the same time achieving a consistently lower error in the size of detected rooms.

Many location-based applications such as geo-social networks rely on location services storing mobile object positions. To update positions on location servers, position update protocols are used. On the one hand, these protocols decide when an update has to be sent to ensure a certain quality of position information. On the other hand, they try to minimize the energy consumption of the mobile device by reducing communication to a minimum.

The advent of mobile phones paved the way for a new paradigm for gathering sensor data termed Public Sensing (PS). PS uses built-in sensors of mobile devices to opportunistically gather sensor data. For instance, the microphones of a crowd of mobile phones can be used to capture sound samples, which can be used to construct a city noise map. A great challenge of PS is to reduce the energy consumption of mobile devices since otherwise users might not be willing to participate. One crucial part in the overall power consumption is the energy required for the communication between the mobile devices and the infrastructure. In particular, the communication required for sending sensing queries to mobile devices has been largely neglected in the related work so far. Therefore, in this paper, we address the problem of minimizing communication costs for the distribution of sensing queries. While existing systems simply broadcast sensing queries to all devices, we use a selective strategy by addressing only a subset of devices. In order not to negatively affect the quality of sensing w.r.t. completeness, this subset is carefully chosen based on a probabilistic sensing model that defines the probability of mobile devices to successfully perform a given sensing query. Our evaluations show that with our optimized sensing query distribution, the energy consumption can be reduced by more than 70% without significantly reducing the quality of sensing.

Utilizing peoples' mobile devices for gathering sensor data has attracted a lot of attention within the last few years. As a result, a great variety of systems for sensing environmental phenomena like temperature or noise have been proposed. However, most of these systems do not take into account that mobile devices have only limited energy resources. For instance, an often assumed prerequisite is that mobile devices are always aware of their position. Given the fact that a position fix is a very energy consuming operation, continuous positioning would quickly drain a device's battery. Since the owners of the mobile devices will not tolerate a significant reduction of the devices' battery lifetime, such an approach is not suitable. To address this issue we present PSense, a flexible system for efficiently gathering sensor data with mobile devices. By avoiding unnecessary position fixes, PSense reduces the energy consumption of mobile devices by up to 70% compared to existing mobile sensing approaches. This is achieved by introducing an adaptive positioning mechanism and by utilizing energy efficient short-range communication to exchange position related information.

Recent forecasts predict that the amount of cellular data traffic will significantly increase within the next few years. The reason for this trend is on the one hand the high growth rate of mobile Internet users and on the other hand the growing popularity of high bandwidth streaming applications. Given the fact that cellular networks (e.g. UMTS) have only limited capacity, the existing network infrastructure will soon reach its limits. As a result, the concept of traffic offloading attracts more and more attention in research since it aims at the reduction of cellular traffic by shifting it to local-area networks like Wifi. One particular form of traffic offloading is known as opportunistic traffic offloading and follows the basic idea to shift traffic from the cellular network to the level of inter-device communication of mobile devices. To perform opportunistic traffic offloading in an efficient way, assumptions about the prospective inter-device connectivity of the mobile devices have to be made. In general, the more inter-device connections are possible the more traffic can be offloaded. To utilize this fact, we developed the TOMP system. TOMP is the first opportunistic traffic offloading system that uses movement predictions of mobile users to analyze the prospective inter-device connectivity. In this paper we propose three different metrics for analyzing movement predictions and present an algorithm, which uses these metrics to utilize an efficient opportunistic traffic offloading. To evaluate TOMP, we show by simulation that we can save up to 40% of cellular messages in comparison to a typical cellular network.

With the increasing proliferation of small and cheap GPS receivers, a new way of generating road maps could be witnessed over the last few years. Participatory mapping approaches like OpenStreetMap introduced a way to generate road maps collaboratively from scratch. Moreover, automatic mapping algorithms were proposed, which automatically infer road maps from a set of given GPS traces. Nevertheless, one of the main problems of these maps is their unknown quality in terms of accuracy, which makes them unreliable and, therefore, not applicable for the use in critical scenarios. To address this issue, we propose MapCorrect: An automatic map correction and validation system. MapCorrect automatically collects GPS traces from people's mobile devices to correct a given road map and validate it by identifying those parts of the map that are accurately mapped with respect to some user provided quality requirements. Since fixing a GPS position is a battery draining operation, the collection of GPS data raises concerns about the energy consumption of the participating mobile devices. We tackle this issue by introducing an optimized sensing mechanism that gives the mobile devices notifications indicating those parts of the map that are considered as sufficiently mapped and, therefore, require no further GPS data for their validation. Furthermore, we show by simulation that using this approach up to 50% of the mobile phones' energy can be saved while not impairing the effectiveness of the map correction and validation process at all.

A novel portable hardware architecture of the Elliptic Curve Method of factoring, designed and optimized for application in the relation collection step of the Number Field Sieve, is described and analyzed. A comparison with an earlier proof-of-concept design by Pelzl et al. has been performed, and a substantial improvement has been demonstrated in terms of both the execution time and the area-time product. The ECM architecture has been ported across five different families of FPGA devices in order to select the family with the best performance to cost ratio. A timing comparison with the highly optimized software implementation, GMP-ECM, has been performed. Our results indicate that low-cost families of FPGAs, such as Spartan-3 and Spartan-3E, offer at least an order of magnitude improvement over the same generation of microprocessors in terms of the performance to cost ratio, without the use of embedded FPGA resources, such as embedded multipliers.