Pattern Mining and Sense-Making Support for Enhancing the User Experience

While data mining techniques such as frequent itemset and sequence mining are well established as powerful pattern discovery tools in domains from science, medicine to business, a detriment is the lack of support for interactive exploration of high numbers of patterns generated with diverse parameter settings and the relationships among the mined patterns. To enhance the user experience, real-time query turnaround times and improved support for interactive mining are desired. There is also an increasing interest in applying data mining solutions for mobile data. Patterns mined over mobile data may enable context-aware applications ranging from automating frequently repeated tasks to providing personalized recommendations. Overall, this dissertation addresses three problems that limit the utility of data mining, namely, (a.) lack of interactive exploration tools for mined patterns, (b.) insufficient support for mining localized patterns, and (c.) high computational mining requirements prohibiting mining of patterns on smaller compute units such as a smartphone. This dissertation develops interactive frameworks for the guided exploration of mined patterns and their relationships. Contributions include the PARAS pre- processing and indexing framework; enabling analysts to gain key insights into rule relationships in a parameter space view due to the compact storage of rules that enables query-time reconstruction of complete rulesets. Contributions also include the visual rule exploration framework FIRE that presents an interactive dual view of the parameter space and the rule space, that together enable enhanced sense-making of rule relationships. This dissertation also supports the online mining of localized association rules computed on data subsets by selectively deploying alternative execution strategies that leverage multidimensional itemset-based data partitioning index. Finally, we designed OLAPH, an on-device context-aware service that learns phone usage patterns over mobile context data such as app usage, location, call and SMS logs to provide device intelligence. Concepts introduced for modeling mobile data as sequences include compressing context logs to intervaled context events, adding generalized time features, and identifying meaningful sequences via filter expressions

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1990 phase 1 projects

The research objectives of the 280 projects placed under contract in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1990 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 program are described. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses in response to NASA's 1990 SBIR Phase 1 Program Solicitation. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 280, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. The document also includes Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference in the 1990 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA field center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number

Leveraging Program Analysis to Reduce User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Applications

Reducing network latency in mobile applications is an effective way of improving the mobile user experience and has tangible economic benefits. This paper presents PALOMA, a novel client-centric technique for reducing the network latency by prefetching HTTP requests in Android apps. Our work leverages string analysis and callback control-flow analysis to automatically instrument apps using PALOMA's rigorous formulation of scenarios that address "what" and "when" to prefetch. PALOMA has been shown to incur significant runtime savings (several hundred milliseconds per prefetchable HTTP request), both when applied on a reusable evaluation benchmark we have developed and on real applicationsComment: ICSE 201

Trustworthy Wireless Personal Area Networks

In the Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects are equipped with the ability to compute and communicate. These smart things have invaded the lives of everyday people, being constantly carried or worn on our bodies, and entering into our homes, our healthcare, and beyond. This has given rise to wireless networks of smart, connected, always-on, personal things that are constantly around us, and have unfettered access to our most personal data as well as all of the other devices that we own and encounter throughout our day. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that our personal devices and data are frequent targets of ever-present threats. Securing these devices and networks, however, is challenging. In this dissertation, we outline three critical problems in the context of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and present our solutions to these problems. First, I present our Trusted I/O solution (BASTION-SGX) for protecting sensitive user data transferred between wirelessly connected (Bluetooth) devices. This work shows how in-transit data can be protected from privileged threats, such as a compromised OS, on commodity systems. I present insights into the Bluetooth architecture, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and how a Trusted I/O solution can be engineered on commodity devices equipped with SGX. Second, I present our work on AMULET and how we successfully built a wearable health hub that can run multiple health applications, provide strong security properties, and operate on a single charge for weeks or even months at a time. I present the design and evaluation of our highly efficient event-driven programming model, the design of our low-power operating system, and developer tools for profiling ultra-low-power applications at compile time. Third, I present a new approach (VIA) that helps devices at the center of WPANs (e.g., smartphones) to verify the authenticity of interactions with other devices. This work builds on past work in anomaly detection techniques and shows how these techniques can be applied to Bluetooth network traffic. Specifically, we show how to create normality models based on fine- and course-grained insights from network traffic, which can be used to verify the authenticity of future interactions