Title of the PhD Thesis: Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis of Location Data for the Design of Human Mobility Services and Infrastructures
Advisor: Prof. Simone Vantini (Politecnico di Milano)
Area of Mathematics: Statistical Learning and Mobility Data Analytics
PhD Committee Members: Prof. Konrad Pawel Abramowicz (Umea University), Prof. Alessandra Menafoglio (Politecnico di Milano), Prof. Alessia Pini (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore-Milano)
In her thesis, Arianna addressed the critical balance between leveraging mobility data and protecting individual privacy in an era of increasing data availability. Her research developed three complementary approaches: analyzing anonymized public transportation passenger counts in Milan using advanced statistical and machine-learning models; creating accessibility maps from aggregated GPS data to study university travel times and their impact on academic performance; and developing a synthetic data generation framework for GPS trajectories that maintains analytical utility while ensuring privacy compliance.