Mobile computing has, in the past half a decade, taken off in ways that were not anticipated. An important component of this revolution has been the co-evolution of cloud computing, which has been used to enhance the capabilities of a mobile device. If this revolution is to be sustained, it is imperative that we leverage the strengths of mobile devices, namely the presence of many useful sensors, in novel ways that greatly increase their utility. Sensor data (audio, images, video) sharing has proven to have enormous social value, and a challenge in sensor data sharing but one that provides interesting opportunities, is to ensure the privacy of sensor data. In this talk, I will present two pieces of recent work that suggest a common framework within which to explore privacy issues for sensor data.

Ramesh Govindan received his B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. His research interests include routing and measurements in large internets, wireless sensor networks, and mobile computing systems. He is a Fellow of the ACM.