Deim Seminar
Title
Sequence Alignment as an Intelligent Method for Spatio-temporalHuman Activity Analysis
Conferenciant
Dr. Noam Shoval
Professor/a organitzador/a
Institution
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Date
17-12-2008 16:00
Summary
This conference is particularly addressed to people interested on
Privacy Preserving and Intelligent Data Analysis.
The focus of the research of Dr. Shoval is on the tracking of tourists,
which concerns: privacy issues (private information
about location must not be publicly available) and generation of
profiles (to identify types of tourists and design personalized services
for them).
The presentation introduces the method of sequence alignment as a tool
for analyzing the sequential aspects within the temporal and spatial
dimensions of human activities. Sequence alignment was first developed
during the 1980s and employed by biochemists to analyze DNA sequences.
Towards the end of the 1990s it was adapted for use in the social
sciences. However, unlike other social sciences practitioners,
geographers have not, until now, exploited this method. Unlike
traditional quantitative methods, sequence alignment, as its name
suggests, is directly concerned with the order (sequence) of events, and
is thus well suited for the pursuit of time-geographical research.
In order to demonstrate the merits of sequence alignment for geographic
research, a database composed of 40 space-time sequences of visitors who
had visited the Old City of Akko (Israel) was used. The sequences were
obtained by means of GPS devices, which were distributed among the
visitors tracked and which they operated for the duration of their visit
of the city. The sequences thus obtained were aligned using ClustalG, a
sequence alignment computer program. The result of this analysis was the
identification of three temporal-spatial time geographies of the
visitors that were sampled in this study.
Place
Lab 231 (a confirmar)
Language
an
