17,945 research outputs found
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
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
The edge cloud: A holistic view of communication, computation and caching
The evolution of communication networks shows a clear shift of focus from
just improving the communications aspects to enabling new important services,
from Industry 4.0 to automated driving, virtual/augmented reality, Internet of
Things (IoT), and so on. This trend is evident in the roadmap planned for the
deployment of the fifth generation (5G) communication networks. This ambitious
goal requires a paradigm shift towards a vision that looks at communication,
computation and caching (3C) resources as three components of a single holistic
system. The further step is to bring these 3C resources closer to the mobile
user, at the edge of the network, to enable very low latency and high
reliability services. The scope of this chapter is to show that signal
processing techniques can play a key role in this new vision. In particular, we
motivate the joint optimization of 3C resources. Then we show how graph-based
representations can play a key role in building effective learning methods and
devising innovative resource allocation techniques.Comment: to appear in the book "Cooperative and Graph Signal Pocessing:
Principles and Applications", P. Djuric and C. Richard Eds., Academic Press,
Elsevier, 201
AndroShield:automated Android applications vulnerability detection, a hybrid static and dynamic analysis approach
The security of mobile applications has become a major research field which is associated with a lot of challenges. The high rate of developing mobile applications has resulted in less secure applications. This is due to what is called the “rush to release” as defined by Ponemon Institute. Security testing—which is considered one of the main phases of the development life cycle—is either not performed or given minimal time; hence, there is a need for security testing automation. One of the techniques used is Automated Vulnerability Detection. Vulnerability detection is one of the security tests that aims at pinpointing potential security leaks. Fixing those leaks results in protecting smart-phones and tablet mobile device users against attacks. This paper focuses on building a hybrid approach of static and dynamic analysis for detecting the vulnerabilities of Android applications. This approach is capsuled in a usable platform (web application) to make it easy to use for both public users and professional developers. Static analysis, on one hand, performs code analysis. It does not require running the application to detect vulnerabilities. Dynamic analysis, on the other hand, detects the vulnerabilities that are dependent on the run-time behaviour of the application and cannot be detected using static analysis. The model is evaluated against different applications with different security vulnerabilities. Compared with other detection platforms, our model detects information leaks as well as insecure network requests alongside other commonly detected flaws that harm users’ privacy. The code is available through a GitHub repository for public contribution
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
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