Enhancing Usability, Security, and Performance in Mobile Computing

We have witnessed the prevalence of smart devices in every aspect of human life. However, the ever-growing smart devices present significant challenges in terms of usability, security, and performance. First, we need to design new interfaces to improve the device usability which has been neglected during the rapid shift from hand-held mobile devices to wearables. Second, we need to protect smart devices with abundant private data against unauthorized users. Last, new applications with compute-intensive tasks demand the integration of emerging mobile backend infrastructure. This dissertation focuses on addressing these challenges. First, we present GlassGesture, a system that improves the usability of Google Glass through a head gesture user interface with gesture recognition and authentication. We accelerate the recognition by employing a novel similarity search scheme, and improve the authentication performance by applying new features of head movements in an ensemble learning method. as a result, GlassGesture achieves 96% gesture recognition accuracy. Furthermore, GlassGesture accepts authorized users in nearly 92% of trials, and rejects attackers in nearly 99% of trials. Next, we investigate the authentication between a smartphone and a paired smartwatch. We design and implement WearLock, a system that utilizes one\u27s smartwatch to unlock one\u27s smartphone via acoustic tones. We build an acoustic modem with sub-channel selection and adaptive modulation, which generates modulated acoustic signals to maximize the unlocking success rate against ambient noise. We leverage the motion similarities of the devices to eliminate unnecessary unlocking. We also offload heavy computation tasks from the smartwatch to the smartphone to shorten response time and save energy. The acoustic modem achieves a low bit error rate (BER) of 8%. Compared to traditional manual personal identification numbers (PINs) entry, WearLock not only automates the unlocking but also speeds it up by at least 18%. Last, we consider low-latency video analytics on mobile devices, leveraging emerging mobile backend infrastructure. We design and implement LAVEA, a system which offloads computation from mobile clients to edge nodes, to accomplish tasks with intensive computation at places closer to users in a timely manner. We formulate an optimization problem for offloading task selection and prioritize offloading requests received at the edge node to minimize the response time. We design and compare various task placement schemes for inter-edge collaboration to further improve the overall response time. Our results show that the client-edge configuration has a speedup ranging from 1.3x to 4x against running solely by the client and 1.2x to 1.7x against the client-cloud configuration

Indoor outdoor detection

Abstract. This thesis shows a viable machine learning model that detects Indoor or Outdoor on smartphones. The model was designed as a classification problem and it was trained with data collected from several smartphone sensors by participants of a field trial conducted. The data collected was labeled manually either indoor or outdoor by the participants themselves. The model was then iterated over to lower the energy consumption by utilizing feature selection techniques and subsampling techniques. The model which uses all of the data achieved a 99 % prediction accuracy, while the energy efficient model achieved 92.91 %. This work provides the tools for researchers to quantify environmental exposure using smartphones

Custom Dual Transportation Mode Detection by Smartphone Devices Exploiting Sensor Diversity

Making applications aware of the mobility experienced by the user can open the door to a wide range of novel services in different use-cases, from smart parking to vehicular traffic monitoring. In the literature, there are many different studies demonstrating the theoretical possibility of performing Transportation Mode Detection (TMD) by mining smart-phones embedded sensors data. However, very few of them provide details on the benchmarking process and on how to implement the detection process in practice. In this study, we provide guidelines and fundamental results that can be useful for both researcher and practitioners aiming at implementing a working TMD system. These guidelines consist of three main contributions. First, we detail the construction of a training dataset, gathered by heterogeneous users and including five different transportation modes; the dataset is made available to the research community as reference benchmark. Second, we provide an in-depth analysis of the sensor-relevance for the case of Dual TDM, which is required by most of mobility-aware applications. Third, we investigate the possibility to perform TMD of unknown users/instances not present in the training set and we compare with state-of-the-art Android APIs for activity recognition.Comment: Pre-print of the accepted version for the 14th Workshop on Context and Activity Modeling and Recognition (IEEE COMOREA 2018), Athens, Greece, March 19-23, 201

Robust Energy Consumption Prediction with a Missing Value-Resilient Metaheuristic-based Neural Network in Mobile App Development

Energy consumption is a fundamental concern in mobile application development, bearing substantial significance for both developers and end-users. Moreover, it is a critical determinant in the consumer's decision-making process when considering a smartphone purchase. From the sustainability perspective, it becomes imperative to explore approaches aimed at mitigating the energy consumption of mobile devices, given the significant global consequences arising from the extensive utilisation of billions of smartphones, which imparts a profound environmental impact. Despite the existence of various energy-efficient programming practices within the Android platform, the dominant mobile ecosystem, there remains a need for documented machine learning-based energy prediction algorithms tailored explicitly for mobile app development. Hence, the main objective of this research is to propose a novel neural network-based framework, enhanced by a metaheuristic approach, to achieve robust energy prediction in the context of mobile app development. The metaheuristic approach here plays a crucial role in not only identifying suitable learning algorithms and their corresponding parameters but also determining the optimal number of layers and neurons within each layer. To the best of our knowledge, prior studies have yet to employ any metaheuristic algorithm to address all these hyperparameters simultaneously. Moreover, due to limitations in accessing certain aspects of a mobile phone, there might be missing data in the data set, and the proposed framework can handle this. In addition, we conducted an optimal algorithm selection strategy, employing 13 metaheuristic algorithms, to identify the best algorithm based on accuracy and resistance to missing values. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach yields significant outcomes for energy consumption prediction.Comment: The paper is submitted to a related journa

FutureWare: Designing a Middleware for Anticipatory Mobile Computing

Ubiquitous computing is moving from context-awareness to context-prediction. In order to build truly anticipatory systems developers have to deal with many challenges, from multimodal sensing to modeling context from sensed data, and, when necessary, coordinating multiple predictive models across devices. Novel expressive programming interfaces and paradigms are needed for this new class of mobile and ubiquitous applications. In this paper we present FutureWare, a middleware for seamless development of mobile applications that rely on context prediction. FutureWare exposes an expressive API to lift the burden of mobile sensing, individual and group behavior modeling, and future context querying, from an application developer. We implement FutureWare as an Android library, and through a scenario-based testing and a demo app we show that it represents an efficient way of supporting anticipatory applications, reducing the necessary coding effort by two orders of magnitude