Identify the position of a smartphone in a shopping mall
Your smartphone goes everywhere with you—whether driving to the grocery store or shopping for holiday gifts. With your permission, apps can use your location to provide contextual information. You might get driving directions, find a store, or receive alerts for nearby promotions. These handy features are enabled by GPS, which requires outdoor exposure for the best accuracy. Yet, there are many times when you’re inside large structures, such as a shopping mall or event center. Accurate indoor positioning, based on public sensors and user permission, allows for a great location-based experience even when you aren’t outside.
Current positioning solutions have poor accuracy, particularly in multi-level buildings, or generalize poorly to small datasets. Additionally, GPS was built for a time before smartphones. Today’s use cases often require more granularity than is typically available indoors.
In this competition, your task is to predict the indoor position of smartphones based on real-time sensor data, provided by indoor positioning technology company XYZ10 in partnership with Microsoft Research. You'll locate devices using “active” localization data, which is made available with the cooperation of the user. Unlike passive localization methods (e.g. radar, camera), the data provided for this competition requires explicit user permission. You'll work with a dataset of nearly 30,000 traces from over 200 buildings.
If successful, you’ll contribute to research with broad-reaching possibilities, including industries like manufacturing, retail, and autonomous devices. With more accurate positioning, existing location-based apps could even be improved. Perhaps you’ll even see the benefits yourself the next time you hit the mall.
XYZ10 is a rising indoor positioning technology company in China. Since 2017, XYZ10 has been accumulating a privacy-sensitive indoor location dataset of WiFi, geomagnetic, and Bluetooth signatures with ground truths from nearly 1,000 buildings.
Microsoft Research is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. Its goal is to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world research-motivated competition problems through technological innovation in collaboration with academic, government, and industry researchers.
https://www.kaggle.com/c/indoor-location-navigation/overview