Location-aware technologies, such as personal navigation applications, location-based AR games, and artificial intelligence systems that learn from data about places, increasingly mediate our understanding of and interactions with the world. However, a number of risks associated with location-aware technologies have emerged, jeopardizing the welfare of its users. This dissertation seeks to understand and mitigate two such emerging risks associated with location-aware technologies - safety and geographic biases. The first part of this dissertation focuses on understanding and mitigating the safety issues in one of the most popular location-aware technologies - personal navigation systems. We analyzed catastrophic incidents that involved the use of personal navigation applications, identified technological causes that contributed to these incidents, and designed solutions to mitigate the most prominent technological causes. The second part of this dissertation focuses on mitigating the geographic biases in two types of location-aware technologies that leverage data-driven artificial intelligence - location-aware technologies based on computer vision and location-aware technologies based on knowledge base.

Creator

• Lin, Yilun

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-1241-j334

Subject

• Geographic information science and geodesy
• Computer science

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15521
• etdadmin_upload_814332

Keyword

• Location-aware technologies
• Geographic inequalities
• Human-centered AI

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright