Tuesday, August 11, 2015

PhD Defense in the field of crime analysis

Today, scholars and visitors at the University of Salzburg could witness another impressive PhD defense within the Doctoral College GIScience. Ourania Kounadi, who worked over the last four years on the topic “Geospatial Privacy Framework for Confidential Discrete Data with Emphasis on Spatial Crime Analysis & Visualisation” defended successfully her research work.
 
Her main supervisor, Prof. Michael Leitner who has his main affiliation with Lousiana State University acted as the chair. Prof. Francis Harvey from Leibnitz Institut für Länderkunde and Prof. Thomas Blaschke, head of the DK GIScience, served as discussants. 

In her research work Rania aimed to understand the risks, trends, and opinions on location privacy. Existing protection methods for confidential discrete location data as well as published warnings about disclosure risk were reviewed. Furthermore, the public’s perception on location privacy in the particular context of crime mapping was collected through interviews and further analyzed. Also a basis was created to achieve the second aim of this thesis, which is to offer cartographic display guidelines when crime data are presented on public maps or disseminated among stakeholders. The results are scientifically innovative and highly relevant for the work of Law enforcement agencies like the Bundeskriminalamt.

We wish Rania all the best for her future career and endeavours.