PinPlace: Associate Semantic Meanings with Indoor Locations without Active Fingerprinting

Web map services today, such as Google and Bing maps, have digitalized a great portion of the physical world into easily accessible location databases. After the industry invested huge efforts in gathering related information, a user now can search a physical location on the map and know what kind of place it is, known as reverse geo-coding. However, this functionality is mostly limited to public outdoor locations and to building level granularity. We believe that many services can benefit from knowing the semantic meanings of fine-grained locations including indoor places. For example, the phone can mute and delay incoming calls when a user enters a meeting room. Cameras can be disabled in bathrooms to protect users' privacy. In this paper, we present PinPlace, an on-device service that can automatically associate semantic meanings with outdoor and indoor locations using the activity, transit, and time related features.