Which design decisions in AI-enabled mobile applications contribute to greener AI?

Background: The construction, evolution and usage of complex artificial intelligence (AI) models demand expensive computational resources. While currently available high-performance computing environments support well this complexity, the deployment of AI models in mobile devices, which is an increasing trend, is challenging. Mobile applications consist of environments with low computational resources and hence imply limitations in the design decisions during the AI-enabled software engineering lifecycle that balance the trade-off between the accuracy and the complexity of the mobile applications. Objective: Our objective is to systematically assess the trade-off between accuracy and complexity when deploying complex AI models (e.g. neural networks) to mobile devices, which have an implicit resource limitation. We aim to cover (i) the impact of the design decisions on the achievement of high-accuracy and low resource-consumption implementations; and (ii) the validation of profiling tools for systematically promoting greener AI. In this way, we aim to provide a quantitative analysis of the performance of AI-enabled applications in operation with respect to their design decisions. Method: This confirmatory registered report consists of a plan to conduct an empirical study to quantify the implications of the design decisions on AI-enabled applications performance and to report experiences of the end-to-end AI-enabled software engineering lifecycle. Concretely, we will implement both image-based and language-based neural networks in mobile applications to solve multiple image classification and text classification problems on different benchmark datasets. For that, we make use of the Android Studio and Unity3D frameworks for building mobile applications that work over Android; and TensorFlow Lite and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) file formats for deploying the AI models in the applications. Overall, we plan to model the accuracy and complexity of AI-enabled applications in operation with respect to their design decisions and will provide tools for allowing practitioners to gain consciousness of the quantitative relationship between the design decisions and the green characteristics of study. Additionally, we will provide experiences in the end-to-end AI-enabled software lifecycle and discuss the challenges found, tools and practices for practitioners. Finally, we will provide an open-source data repository following the ESEM open science practices and containing all the experimentation, analysis and reports in our study.This work has been partially supported by the DOGO4ML Spanish research project (ref. PID2020-117191RB-I00) and by the the "Beatriz Galindo" Spanish Program BEAGAL18/00064.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

ANANAS - A Framework For Analyzing Android Applications

Android is an open software platform for mobile devices with a large market share in the smartphone sector. The openness of the system as well as its wide adoption lead to an increasing amount of malware developed for this platform. ANANAS is an expandable and modular framework for analyzing Android applications. It takes care of common needs for dynamic malware analysis and provides an interface for the development of plugins. Adaptability and expandability have been main design goals during the development process. An abstraction layer for simple user interaction and phone event simulation is also part of the framework. It allows an analyst to script the required user simulation or phone events on demand or adjust the simulation to his needs. Six plugins have been developed for ANANAS. They represent well known techniques for malware analysis, such as system call hooking and network traffic analysis. The focus clearly lies on dynamic analysis, as five of the six plugins are dynamic analysis methods.Comment: Paper accepted at First Int. Workshop on Emerging Cyberthreats and Countermeasures ECTCM 201

Analisis Dan Perancangan Aplikasi Android Buku Dunia Tumbuhan (Plantae)

Technological developments in mobile devices is growing rapidly, the one that is popular today is Android. Android is an open operating system platform designed for mobile devices. The high interest and the amount of public enthusiasm to android application make a lot of developers to develop Android-based applications to provide full facilities to the community. Therefore the design of the world of plants book android application aims to make it easier to learn about the world of plant taxonomy.Plantae has a diversity of plant species that are formed because of differences in the Earth's climate. The number of plant species was classified in the taxon (levels) that make up the world of plants (Plantae). Levels of classification in the plant world is divided into seven levels, namely kingdom, division, classis, order, family, genus, species. Grouping of each taxon based on similar physical characteristics possessed by each plant. With the android apps world of plants is expected to be one of the easy learning facility in conveying information about the world of plant taxonomy.Conclusions after the analysis and design of the the world of plants book based android, successfully made. Its appearance a simple and informative. The world of plants book android application contains about 250 species of seed plants that grow in Indonesia. Applications can run on android devices from version 2.2 froyo (frozen yogurt) to version 4.3 Jelly Bean. This application can be one of the world's media to learn about the taxonomy of plants to the public

The contribution of mLearning to the study of local culture in the Malaysian university context

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.This thesis is concerned with the impact of mobile learning (mLearning) on the study of local culture at Malaysian universities. For convenience, the term Local Cultural Studies (LCS) is given to Humanities subjects related to the teaching and learning of Malay culture, for example: Local History, Local Culture and National Heritage, Malay Wood Craft, Malay Drum, Cooking, Batik Textile, Ceramic, and Local Drama. These subjects are not as popular as Science and Engineering and are often referred to as ‘dying traditional knowledge’ with an uncertain future. They have a lesser degree of significance in modern Malaysian society in achieving a ‘developed country’ status. One motivation for introducing mLearning into LCS subjects is to make them more interesting: the learning activities and the subjects should appear more modern by linking them to the latest technology. The fact that all students own mobile phones in Malaysian universities creates an opportunity to use mLearning for the benefit of LCS. In addition, mLearning could be used to create student-generated content to add richer multimedia learning resources as one of the major challenges for LCS is the limited availability of resources. An exploratory preliminary study with managers and content developers within mobile application companies confirmed there were limited local mobile content and little incentive to develop more. A major focus of this thesis was to investigate two approaches to overcoming this problem: (1) the development of culturally appropriate interface design guidelines that could be used to assist developers and academics in the production of local content; and (2) involving students in creating local content in student-generated mLearning activities. This largely qualitative study focused on gaining an understanding of mLearning’s contributions to the study of local culture from the perspective of academics and students at predominantly Malaysian public universities. The research was designed in two stages. In Stage 1, Nielsen’s user interface design guidelines were first adapted to include two cultural design principles based on local Malay cultural content and aesthetic values and then used as a probe to uncover academic and student views on culturally appropriate design during a heuristic evaluation of three mobile applications with a Malay cultural focus. The heuristic evaluation of the mLearning applications also served to raise awareness of mLearning and opened the way for interviews with academics and focus group discussions with students about their pre-existing experiences with mobile technologies and perspectives on mLearning. The interviews and focus group discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, translated, and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. Consequently at Stage 2, student-generated activities using mobile devices were introduced. These included students making videos, taking photographs and sound recording interviews in their LCS subjects using a mix of mobile devices such as mobile phones, laptops and cameras. Then a second round of interviews and focus group discussions was conducted to understand participants’ perspectives of mLearning and in particular, mLearning involving student-generated content. Data was analysed again using thematic analysis. The first key finding of the study identified academic and students’ perspectives on culturally appropriate design guidelines related to the usability of mLearning LCS applications. The participants confirmed that suitable local cultural content appropriate to the subject and local aesthetic values were important and could motivate learning. The most important local cultural aspect was found to be the use of local language, Bahasa Malaysia, or bilingual interfaces. A more complex aspect of interface design was the inclusion of philosophical values relating to Malay and Islamic philosophy. The study also demonstrated that it is inadequate to exclusively emphasise culture. General usability principles were also observed as significant, for instance, consistency, minimalist design, efficiency, flexibility and error management, and should be taken into consideration in designing LCS applications. Furthermore, the findings identified participants’ pre-existing experiences and perspectives of mobile technologies and mLearning. They used mobile phones extensively for personal leisure and interest although students were more advanced than academics in exploring software applications for mobile phones. At university the majority of participants used their mobile phones for communication for educational purposes. However, they did this without being aware that these activities were mLearning-related. They also identified challenges for introducing mLearning: lack of local mLearning content and limited ethical policies to regulate mLearning were of concern for both academics and students. Changes to participants’ perspectives on mLearning were observed following the student-generated content activities in Stage 2. Academics were more aware and stated that they were more open to allowing students to use mobile phones for student-generated activities. Students benefited by gaining new multimedia skills and accomplishing better quality assignments using mobile devices. They reported creating, accessing and sharing multimedia digital content (videos, photos and audio files) both within the classroom and during fieldwork at cultural sites. This was found to reduce the challenge of limited local content for LCS subjects. Peer assistance and collaboration from other participants reduced technical challenges. Therefore, both academics and students showed more positive attitudes and interest in using mobile devices for facilitating learning in LCS after experiencing student-generated activities. The contributions of this thesis are therefore: • Understandings of culturally appropriate design in the Malay context which could assist mobile developers to produce more local content or could be used by academics or students to guide them in creating local content for learning. These understandings might further be extended to other cultural contexts. • Insights into how academics’ and students’ established mobile phone practices, as well as their pre-existing uses of mobile devices for educational purposes, could lead to greater awareness and a wider adoption of mLearning to improve LCS subjects. • A holistic understanding of participants’ perspectives on student-generated content in mLearning activities as a way to remedy the lack of content for LCS studies. This could be applied also to other subject areas

A taxonomy and business analysis for mobile web applications

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-115).Mobile web applications refer to web applications on mobile devices, aimed at personalizing, integrating, and discovering mobile contents in user contexts. This thesis presents a comprehensive study of mobile web applications by proposing a new taxonomy for mobile web applications, and conducting a business analysis in the field of mobile web applications. The thesis reviews the current surrounding environment for mobile web applications, namely, web 2.0 and 3.0, wireless communication technology, and Smartphone platform. The recent entry and success of Apple's iPhone greatly enhanced the public awareness of the Smartphone technology. Google's release of open-source Android platform and T-Mobile's deployment of Android-powered "Dream" Smartphone not only intensify the competition among suppliers, but also provide an open-source foundation for mobile web applications. This thesis introduces a new mobile web application taxonomy to systematically study the values and the groupings of the mobile web applications. By introducing features and categories, the taxonomy provides a framework so the related companies and businesses can be comparatively analyzed and summarized. Selected case companies are studied in the light of the taxonomy. The thesis discusses the key issues of mobile web aggregation, namely, mobile application development platform, context modeling, mobile user interface, mobile application logic, and mobile web aggregation strategy.(cont.) "System Thinking" is applied to the management of mobile web application business. The market ecosystem, the value proposition, and the revenue model for mobile web application are described. A system dynamic model is constructed to understand the dynamic among the key factors in the mobile web business. Experimental results are reported in the thesis.by Kevin Hao Liu.S.M

Dependability Assessment of Android OS

In this brave new world of smartphone-dependent society, dependability is a strong requirement and needs to be addressed properly. Assessing the dependability of these mobile system is still an open issue, and companies should have the tools to improve their devices and beat the competition against other vendors. The main objective of this dissertation is to provide the methods to assess the dependability of mobile OS, fundamental for further improvements. Mobile OS are threatened mainly by traditional residual faults (when errors spread across components as failures), aging-related faults (when errors accumulate over time), and misuses by users and applications. This thesis faces these three aspects. First, it presents a qualitative method to define the fault model of a mobile OS, and an exhaustive fault model for Android. I designed and developed AndroFIT, a novel fault injection tool for Android smartphone, and performed an extensive fault injection campaign on three Android devices from different vendors to analyze the impact of component failure on the mobile OS. Second, it presents an experimental methodology to analyze the software aging phenomenon in mobile OS. I performed a software aging analysis campaign on Android devices to identify the impacting factors on performance degradation and resource consumption. Third, it presents the design and implementation of a novel fuzzing tool, namely Chizpurfle, able to automatically test Android vendor customizations by leveraging code coverage information at run-time

Investigations of outdoor mobility patterns of taxicabs in urban scenarios

This thesis investigates various outdoor mobility patterns of taxicabs in urban environments based on open-data real traces and it proposes a suitable outdoor mobility model to fit the provided measurement data. This thesis is processing user traces of taxicabs of two major cities: Rome and San Francisco downloaded from CRAWDAD open-source repository, which is responsible for sharing data from real networks and real mobile users across the various research communities around the world. There are numerous sources of collecting traces of users in a city, such as mobile devices, vehicles, smart cards, floating sensors etc. This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the mobility patterns of various taxicabs from Rome and San Francisco cities based on data collected via GPS-enabled mobile devices. Finding suitable mobility models of taxicabs to represent the travelling patterns of users moving from one location to another with respect to their varying time, location and speed can be quite helpful for the advanced researches in the diverse fields of wireless communications, such as better network planning, more efficient smart city design, improved traffic flows in cities. Also other applications such as weather forecasting, cellular coverage planning, e-health services, prediction of tourist areas, intelligent transport systems can benefit from the information hidden in user traces and from being able to find out statistically valid mobility models. The work here focused on extracting various mobility parameters from the crowdsourced open-source data and trying to model them according to various mobility models existing in the literature. The measurement analysis of this thesis work was completed in Matlab

Investigations of outdoor mobility patterns of taxicabs in urban scenarios

This thesis investigates various outdoor mobility patterns of taxicabs in urban environments based on open-data real traces and it proposes a suitable outdoor mobility model to fit the provided measurement data. This thesis is processing user traces of taxicabs of two major cities: Rome and San Francisco downloaded from CRAWDAD open-source repository, which is responsible for sharing data from real networks and real mobile users across the various research communities around the world. There are numerous sources of collecting traces of users in a city, such as mobile devices, vehicles, smart cards, floating sensors etc. This thesis presents a comparative analysis of the mobility patterns of various taxicabs from Rome and San Francisco cities based on data collected via GPS-enabled mobile devices. Finding suitable mobility models of taxicabs to represent the travelling patterns of users moving from one location to another with respect to their varying time, location and speed can be quite helpful for the advanced researches in the diverse fields of wireless communications, such as better network planning, more efficient smart city design, improved traffic flows in cities. Also other applications such as weather forecasting, cellular coverage planning, e-health services, prediction of tourist areas, intelligent transport systems can benefit from the information hidden in user traces and from being able to find out statistically valid mobility models. The work here focused on extracting various mobility parameters from the crowdsourced open-source data and trying to model them according to various mobility models existing in the literature. The measurement analysis of this thesis work was completed in Matlab

Software for Wearable Devices: Challenges and Opportunities

Wearable devices are a new form of mobile computer system that provides exclusive and user-personalized services. Wearable devices bring new issues and challenges to computer science and technology. This paper summarizes the development process and the categories of wearable devices. In addition, we present new key issues arising in aspects of wearable devices, including operating systems, database management system, network communication protocol, application development platform, privacy and security, energy consumption, human-computer interaction, software engineering, and big data.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, for Compsac 201