CENS Technical Seminar Series

The Problem with Location (Introduction to Fire Eagle)

Invited Speaker: Dr. Mor Naaman, Yahoo Research, Berkeley
Date: February 8, 2008
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: 4760 Boelter Hall, UCLA

Abstract

Location-based services have been aiming to penetrate the consumer world for several years now. Despite recent technological and market advances, such services are still, seemingly and constantly, around the corner. I will talk about some of the issues that have prevented location technologies from making a big breakthrough. I will then describe Fire Eagle, a new user-location platform about to be released by Yahoo! that will help to alleviate some of these issues. Fire Eagle's mission is to help rapidly and easily integrate location into Web, Desktop and Mobile applications. Through a set of simple but powerful APIs, Fire Eagle allows application developers to securely update or query a user's location, based of course on the user's permission. At the same time, Fire Eagle provides users with unprecedented control over their data and privacy.

Biography

Mor Naaman is a research scientist at Yahoo! Advanced Development Research in Berkeley, where since 2005 he has been leading a team of research engineers and interns. His domains of interests include mobile and ubiquitous computing, interactive multimedia systems, and location- and context-aware computing. Mor employs a human-centered research approach to develop data models, algorithms and applications. Once developed, these tools allow the study of user behavior, user motivations and the characteristics of application use. Mor received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research in the Stanford Infolab also focused on digital media, and in particular the management of digital photographs, thereby allowing (and requiring!) him to take photos throughout his academic career. Mor is a co-chair of the JCDL 2008 Program Committee, a co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2009's Grand Challenge, and a recipient of two JCDL best paper awards. In previous careers, Mor was a professional basketball player as well as a software developer and a college radio DJ. In subsequent careers, Mor hopes to be a professional backpacker and traveler.