Cloud computing and context-awareness: A study of the adapted user experience

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two

Cloud computing and context-awareness : a study of the adapted user experience

Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Mobile map client API : design and implementation for Android

The fast development of computational power of the mobile phone makes it a suitable platform for running map applications. Both public and field working professionals can benefit from easy access to a mobile map client application with features such as route planning, location based services and simple GIS operations. This master's thesis describes the mobile operating system (OS) Android from a geographic information aspect and relates it to other major mobile OS. Available map client application programming interfaces (API) are investigated. It is concluded that Android is a good platform choice for implementing mobile map applications. But there is need of a generic open source API for Android. Such an API is implemented, resulting in a good performing map client. Though it needs additional development to perform all features aimed for in the suggested API design.Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning: Dagens datorlika mobiltelefoner lämpar sig utmärkt för att visa olika typer av kartor. Det är inte svårt att hitta tillämpningar för både privatpersoner och professionella användare med behov som att till exempel hitta lämpliga färdvägar eller visa information om platsen man befinner sig på. Det här examensarbetet går ut på att undersöka hur geografisk data kan behandlas och visas som kartor på Android-mobiler. Målet är att skapa ett generellt programmeringsverktyg som ska kunna användas för att snabbt och enkelt kunna utveckla specialiserade kartapplikationer för Android. Ett sådant verktyg kallas inom databranschen för API, vilket står för Application Programming Interface. Ett API är ett gränssnitt som ger programmerare smidig tillgång till grundläggande funktioner i ett system eller en typ av applikation. I det här fallet får programmeraren tillgång till grundläggande kartfunktioner, som t.ex. kartdataladdning eller panorering och zoom, utan att behöva programmera hela logiken bakom dessa funktioner. Istället kan programmeraren fokusera sitt arbete på de delarna som gör just den kartapplikationen unik. Arbetet är uppdelat i en undersökande del för att klarlägga var utvecklingen av tekniken befinner sig idag och vilka liknande försök som gjorts tidigare och en mer praktisk utvecklingsdel med målet att implementera ett API för kartapplikationer på Android. I undersökningen jämförs Android med andra mobila plattformar, t.ex. Apples iPhone och Nokias Symbian. Det konstateras att Android står sig bra i konkurens med de andra och lämpar sig väl för kartapplikationer men att det skulle behövas ett generellt kartverktyg som inte är så hårt styrt som Google maps, som är det vanligaste kartverktyget för Android. För att tydliggöra vad API:et borde innehålla och klara av att utföra gjordes först en teoretisk modell av dess olika delar. De viktigaste delarna, t.ex. dataladdning och användargränssnitt med kartbildsvisning, panorering och zoom, implementerades sedan för att kunna testköras och vidareutvecklas på en Android-mobil. En demoapplikation utvecklades för att demonstrera användningen av API:et. Resultatet är ett verktyg för ett energibolags servicepersonal att ha med sig i fält för att se deras fjärrvärmenäts geografiska utsträckning och info om nätets olika delar, kopplingar och kunder.Scientific summary: The fast development of computational power of the mobile phone have made it a suitable platform for running map applications. Both public and field working professionals can benefit from easy access to a mobile map client application with features such as route planning, location based services and simple GIS operations. This master's thesis describes the mobile operating system (OS) Android from a geographic information aspect and relates it to other major mobile OS. A map client application programming interfaces (API) is implemented, resulting in a good performing map client. Though it needs additional development to perform all features aimed for in the suggested API design. The study is divided into a state-of-the-art investigation of available technology, and an effort to design and implement a map client API for Android. The investigation was made by referencing available scientific papers, technical articles and websites. Available OS's and API's are investigated. It is concluded that Android is a good platform choice for implementing mobile map applications. But there is need of a generic open source API for Android. Another objective of the study was to compare a map client running as a web application to the native client developed regarding performance. Unfortunately no suiting API for setting up the web application was found. Since then the OpenLayers community have made a great effort for running OpenLayers clients on mobile devices, which would have been an ideal choice for doing the comparison. The work on the API contains a theoretical model which is partly implemented. The aim of the model is to define the overall functionality, some specialized features and cohesive data structures. Then the base functionality, such as data loading, map drawing, panning and zooming, was implemented. The implementation was carried out in an iterative manner. Starting with complementing a basic, incomplete open source map API to gain understanding of mobile map API design and avoid re-inventing the wheel. Added was support for coordinate systems and projections other than WGS 84 Web Mercator (EPSG 4326), better Web Map Service (WMS) support, vector data loading and improved responsiveness when loading data. A demo application was put together in order to test performance on the hardware emulator integrated in the Android SDK and on a real device, Motorola Milestone running Android version 2.1. The scenario for the demo application is a district heating pipe system, an useful field application for a city energy company. The application shows a raster background map loaded from a tiled WMS with the pipe system as vector overlays loaded from a custom Keyhole Markup Language (KML) service. The vector data is click-able in order to show information about different parts of the pipe system

Détection d’anti-patrons dans les applications Android

Mobile apps are becoming complex software systems that must be developed quickly and evolve continuously to fit new user requirements and execution contexts.However, addressing these constraints may result in poor design choices, known as antipatterns, which may incidentally degrade software quality and performance.Thus, the automatic detection of antipatterns is an important activity that eases both maintenance and evolution tasks.Moreover, it guides developers to refactor their applications and thus, to improve their quality.While antipatterns are well-known in object-oriented applications, their study in mobile applications is still in their infancy.In this paper, we propose a tooled approach, called Paprika, to analyze Android applications and to detect object-oriented and Android-specific antipatterns from binaries of mobile apps.We validate the effectiveness of our approach on a set of popular mobile apps downloaded from the Google Play Store.Les applications mobiles deviennent des systèmes logiciels complexes qui doivent être développés rapidement et évoluer continuellement pour s’adapter aux nouvelles exigences des utilisateurs et à de multiples contextes d’exécution. La réponse à ces changements peut mener à de mauvaises solutions de conceptions ou d’implémentations, connues sous le nom d’anti-patrons, qui peuvent dégrader la qualité du logiciel ainsi que ses performances. Par conséquent, la détection automatique de ces anti-patrons est importante pour faciliter les tâches de maintenance etd’évolutions des applications. Cela peut aussi aider les développeurs à réusiner leurs applications et par conséquent augmenter leurs qualités. Bien que les anti-patrons soient bien connues pourles applications orientés objets, leur étude pour les applications mobiles est encore à ses balbutiements. Dans ce rapport, nous proposons une approchée outillée nommée Paprika qui permet d’analyser les binaires d’applications Android afin de détecter des anti-patrons orientés objets et spécifiques à Android. Nous validons l’efficacité de notre approche sur un ensemble de plusieurs applications populaires téléchargées depuis le Google Play Store

Mobility is the Message: Experiments with Mobile Media Sharing

This thesis explores new mobile media sharing applications by building, deploying, and studying their use. While we share media in many different ways both on the web and on mobile phones, there are few ways of sharing media with people physically near us. Studied were three designed and built systems: Push!Music, Columbus, and Portrait Catalog, as well as a fourth commercially available system – Foursquare. This thesis offers four contributions: First, it explores the design space of co-present media sharing of four test systems. Second, through user studies of these systems it reports on how these come to be used. Third, it explores new ways of conducting trials as the technical mobile landscape has changed. Last, we look at how the technical solutions demonstrate different lines of thinking from how similar solutions might look today. Through a Human-Computer Interaction methodology of design, build, and study, we look at systems through the eyes of embodied interaction and examine how the systems come to be in use. Using Goffman’s understanding of social order, we see how these mobile media sharing systems allow people to actively present themselves through these media. In turn, using McLuhan’s way of understanding media, we reflect on how these new systems enable a new type of medium distinct from the web centric media, and how this relates directly to mobility. While media sharing is something that takes place everywhere in western society, it is still tied to the way media is shared through computers. Although often mobile, they do not consider the mobile settings. The systems in this thesis treat mobility as an opportunity for design. It is still left to see how this mobile media sharing will come to present itself in people’s everyday life, and when it does, how we will come to understand it and how it will transform society as a medium distinct from those before. This thesis gives a glimpse at what this future will look like

Mobile Travel Guide for Budget Travelers

The rapid advancement of information and commnnication technologies has being shaping up a new value chain for tourism. Some travel organizers are getting less profit from the standard package tours because of the shift in the structure of tourism. This is because, nowadays travelers or tourists especially backpackers are no longer depending on the travel organizers. People nowadays have no more time to plan their trip and go for a package for a few days time. Thus, whenever these busy people have a little leisure time for a vacation, they will just pack their things into the backpacker, and go for an unplanned vacation. Before going to a trip, they will first find some information via tourism-related website so that they will have an idea on where to go. Once they have the idea, they just go for that trip without knowing they might be facing some kind of problem such as lack of money, getting lost, having no idea on what are the tourists attraction at a new place which can cause them to have a difficult time during the trip occurred. This is because tourism websites are not very informative to meet the travelers' expectations and needs. This research is aims to design and develop a Mobile Travel Guide for Budget Travelers to assist the travelers especially for the backpackers in information seeking and searching through mobile phone. The system will help travelers by giving a suggestion list of possible places of interest where the tourists can go within a limited budget. Basically, the system will provide information needed by tourist such as accommodation, places of interest, transportation, travel and destination organizations. The system will be developed by using a System Development Life Cycle Model which a throwaway prototyping will be used in designing the system. The system will use Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform where it has been used in most of mobile phone available in the market. This paper reports on the researches that have been made for the development stages and the as well as the system architecture of the system. The report also included the final results of the findings as well as the recommendations that have been made for the future enhancement

Affordable desktop computing using low end hardware like Raspberry Pi and Cubiebaord NII LOUS NELSON

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science, Ashesi University College, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Management Information Systems, April 2014The field of computer science over the past two decades has witnessed a huge leap in the areas of improved systems design, hardware processing power and the development of software that maximizes these advances in systems. This leap can attributed to continuous innovation that drives the field to new heights at an ever speedy pace. The pace at which the field is growing requires educators to be abreast with new and changing technology. It is the desire of educators to have access to physical laboratories and computing centers in which they can physically train students. The challenge faced by educators in executing this task is the high expense that comes with the construction of physical laboratories. This write up stems from a project that aims to tackle this challenge by providing low powered, low cost, portable computing systems for students, laboratories and computing centers using devices such as the Raspberry pi and Cubieboard. Although not a perfect system, it promises to be a desirable solution that can be adopted across a wide range of institutions.Ashesi University Colleg

Improving device-aware Web services and their mobile clients through an aspect-oriented, model-driven approach

Este artículo presenta un enfoque para la creación de servicios web flexibles que pueden ser invocados de manera transparente desde diferentes tipos de dispositivos, incluyendo dispositivos móviles. Se utiliza la Programación Orientada a Aspectos y el desarrollo guiado por modelos para reducir el impacto de la adaptación del código de servicio y cliente para múltiples dispositivos y facilitar la tarea del desarrollador. Los desarrolladores pueden marcar en los modelos UML qué servicios deben adaptarse a los dispositivos móviles y obtener automáticamente el código de adaptación desacoplado de los modelos. Este enfoque permite el desarrollo de servicios web conscientes de los dispositivos móviles en una plataforma integrada, manteniendo el código relacionado con el dispositivo completamente desacoplado de la funcionalidad principal y permitiendo una adaptación modularizada y no intrusiva de los clientes móviles a las características específicas del dispositivo y a las preferencias del usuario final.Context: Mobile devices have become an essential element in our daily lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, Web services have become extremely important when offering services through the Internet. However, current Web services are very inflexible as regards their invocation from different types of device, especially if we consider the need for them to be adaptable when being invoked from mobile devices. Objective: In this paper, we provide an approach for the creation of flexible Web services which can be invoked transparently from different device types and which return subsequent responses, as well as providing the client’s adaptation as a result of the particular device characteristics and end-user preferences in a completely decoupled way. Method: Aspect-Oriented Programming and model-driven development have been used to reduce both the impact of service and client code adaptation for multiple devices as well as to facilitate the developer’s task. Results: A model-driven methodology can be followed from system models to code, providing the Web service developer with the option of marking which services should be adapted to mobile devices in the UML models, and obtaining the decoupled adaptation code automatically from the models. Conclusion: We can conclude that the approach presented in this paper provides us with the possibility of following the development of mobile-aware Web services in an integrated platform, benefiting from the use of aspect-oriented techniques not only for maintaining device-related code completely decoupled from the main functionality one, but also allowing a modularized non-intrusive adaptation of mobile clients to the specific device characteristics as well as to final user preferences.This work has been developed thanks to the support of MEC under contract TIN2008-02985 and MEC research Grant José Castillejo

A new architecture for secure two-party mobile payment transactions

xi, 229 leaves : ill. ; 29 cmThe evolution of wireless networks and mobile device technologies has increased concerns about performance and security of mobile systems. We propose a new secured applicationlevel architecture for a two-party mobile payment transaction that is carried out between a resource-limited mobile device and a resource-rich computer server over wireless networks. As an example of such transactions, the mobile banking transaction is focused on throughout this thesis. The proposed architecture, namely SA2pMP, employs a lightweight cryptography scheme (combining both a Public-key cryptography algorithm (ECDSA) and a Symmetric-key cryptography algorithm (AES)), a multi-factor authentication mechanism, and a transaction log strategy. The proposed architecture is designed to satisfy the four properties of confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation that are required by any secure system. The architecture can be implemented on a Java ME enabled mobile device. The security API library can be reused in implementing other two-party mobile applications. The present study shows that SA2pMP is a unique lightweight security architecture providing comprehensive security for two-party mobile payment transactions. In addition, simulations demonstrate that SA2pMP can be installed in resource-limited mobile devices as a downloadable software application. The main contribution of the thesis is to suggest a design for a security architecture for two-party mobile payment transactions, for example, mobile banking. It suggests a four-layer model of mobile payment participants, based on Karnouskos (2004). This model clarifies how participants are involved in a mobile payment transaction. In addition, an improved model is suggested to guide security aspects of system design, which is based on an Onion Layer Framework (Wei, C.Liu, & Koong, 2006)