Mobile Historical

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) seeks NEH Level II Start-Up support for work leading toward the release of Mobile Historical, an open-source (and, optionally, hosted) software application (app) that allows cultural institutions, K-16 teachers, and university-based humanists to publish humanities information to mobile devices. The proposed project builds and extends (dramatically so) an existing mobile app development project aimed at curating the city, Cleveland Historical. We seek funding to scale up, revise, and extend our previous work toward the creation of the open-source tool Mobile Historical. Thus, the principal activities of this proposal are focused on creating a new vehicle for interpretive humanities publishing in mobile environments via innovative technologies and guidance on how to curate humanities content, including especially developing approaches to state-of-the-art interactive humanistic learning for broad public audiences and users

The design, development and evaluation of cross-platform mobile applications and services supporting social accountability monitoring

Local government processes require meaningful and effective participation from both citizens and their governments in order to remain truly democratic. This project investigates the use of mobile phones as a tool for supporting this participation. MobiSAM, a system which aims to enhance the Social Accountability Monitoring (SAM) methodology at local government level, has been designed and implemented. The research presented in this thesis examines tools and techniques for the development of cross-platform client applications, allowing access to the MobiSAM service, across heterogeneous mobile platforms, handsets and interaction styles. Particular attention is paid to providing an easily navigated user interface (UI), as well as offering clear and concise visualisation capabilities. Depending on the host device, interactivity is also included within these visualisations, potentially helping provide further insight into the visualised data. Guided by the results obtained from a comprehensive baseline study of the Grahamstown area, steps are taken in an attempt to lower the barrier of entry to using the MobiSAM service, potentially maximising its market reach. These include extending client application support to all identified mobile platforms (including feature phones); providing multi-language UIs (in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans); as well as ensuring client application data usage is kept to a minimum. The particular strengths of a given device are also leveraged, such as its camera capabilities and built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) module, potentially allowing for more effective engagement with local municipalities. Additionally, a Short Message Service (SMS) gateway is developed, allowing all Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) compatible handsets access to the MobiSAM service via traditional SMS. Following an iterative, user-centred design process, a thorough evaluation of the client application is also performed, in an attempt to gather feedback relating to the navigation and visualisation capabilities. The results of which are used to further refine its design. A comparative usability evaluation using two different versions of the cross-platform client application is also undertaken, highlighting the perceived memorability, learnabilitv and satisfaction of each. Results from the evaluation reveals which version of the client application is to be deployed during future pilot studies

Capturing mobile security policies precisely

The security policies of mobile devices that describe how we should use these devices are often informally specified. Users have preferences for some apps over others. Some users may avoid apps which can access large amounts of their personal data, whilst others may not care. A user is unlikely to write down these policies or describe them using a formal policy language. This is unfortunate as without a formal description of the policy we cannot precisely reason about them. We cannot help users to pick the apps they want if we cannot describe their policies. Companies have mobile security policies that definehowan employee should use smart phone devices and tablet computers from home at work. A company might describe the policy in a natural language document for employees to read and agree to. They might also use some software installed on employee’s devices to enforce the company rules. Without a link between the specification of the policy in the natural language document and the implementation of the policy with the tool, understanding how they are related can be hard. This thesis looks at developing an authorisation logic, called AppPAL, to capture the informal security policies of the mobile ecosystem, which we define as the interactions surrounding the use of mobile devices in a particular setting. This includes the policies of the users, the devices, the app stores, and the environments the users bring the devices into. Whilst earlier work has looked on checking and enforcing policies with low-level controls, this work aims to capture these informal policy’s intents and the trust relationships within them separating the policy specification from its enforcement. This allows us to analyse the informal policies precisely, and reason about how they are used. We show how AppPAL instantiates SecPAL, a policy language designed for access control in distributed environments. We describe AppPAL’s implementation as an authorisation logic for mobile ecosystems. We show how we can check AppPAL policies for common errors. Using AppPAL we show that policies describing users privacy preferences do not seem to match the apps users install. We explore the di↵erences between app stores and how to create new ones based on policy. We look at five BYOD policies and discover previously unexamined idioms within them. This suggests aspects of BYOD policies not managed by current BYOD tools

Curating Kisumu: Adapting Mobile Humanities Interpretation in East Africa

The Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) at Cleveland State University and Maseno University in Kenya seek NEH Level II Start-Up funding for Curating Kisumu to extend best practices for mobile interpretation to the developing world. CPHDH will explore how to use the Curatescape mobile interpretive framework to facilitate interchange between the humanities and pressing needs in East Africa. Faculty and students on both sides of the Atlantic will conduct collaborative research. Our team will also explore how to modify Curatescape to enable bilingual user inputs on the administrative backend and to allow the richest possible experience for users who use still-prevalent feature phones. Our team will develop an educational exchange to create content; develop, implement, and test an app that we adapt thoughtfully to local needs and technical constraints; and collaboratively identify a set of recommendations for overcoming barriers to mobile curation in Africa

“Mobile phones as an ict resource in English teaching as a foreign language”

Mobile phones are ICT devices that allow operations such as calls, messages and Internet browsing. The main objective of this study was to describe the perspective of 14-15-year-old students on the use of mobile phones as an ICT resource in the learning of English as a foreign language at 11 de Noviembre Educative Unit. The research is focused on a quantitative-descriptive design, using a deductive method, based on the perspectives of the participants and the survey applied, which helped to collect real information from a general point of view. For data collection, 10 specific questions were designed and applied with their respective multiple-choice answers on the Likert scale. Once the Covid 19 cases were under control, the students returned to classrooms and with the help of the tutors of two parallels A and B, 21 students between the two grades were chosen. The results of the present research show that mobile phones are an important pedagogical resource for teaching and learning English. Mobile phones are also a resource that can be included in any class and not only in English class. At the same time, the issue of distraction was highlighted as the most common problem identified regarding the use of mobile phones in the classroom. In addition, students agreed that the mobile phone had been a useful teaching-learning resource during the quarantine caused by the pandemic disease Covid19 since it made it easier to access any information they need from the mobile phone. In conclusion, this study revealed that mobile phones played a fundamental role during the pandemic isolation, as it was the most used device in virtual classrooms. Therefore, it helped in training language skills, in other words it turned students’ mobile phones into useful educational tools. However, In the present day, with the return to the classrooms, mobile phones have become a distraction, therefore teachers must be trained in the use of these devices as a resource that allows them to carry out efficient teaching tactics in the classroom, using a variety of strategies and implementing some activities to get students to use their cell phones to learn.Los teléfonos móviles son dispositivos TIC que permiten realizar operaciones como llamadas, mensajes y navegación por Internet. El objetivo principal de este estudio fue describir la perspectiva de los estudiantes de 14 a 15 años sobre el uso del teléfono móvil como recurso TIC en el aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera en la Unidad Educativa 11 de Noviembre. La investigación se centra en un diseño cuantitativo-descriptivo, se utilizó un método deductivo, basado en las perspectivas de los participantes y la encuesta aplicada, que ayudó a recoger información real desde un punto de vista general. Para la recolección de datos, se diseñaron y aplicaron 10 preguntas específicas con sus respectivas respuestas de opción múltiple en la escala de Likert. Una vez controlados los casos de Covid 19, los alumnos volvieron a las aulas y con la ayuda de los tutores de dos paralelos A y B, se eligieron 21 alumnos entre los dos grados. Los resultados de la presente investigación demuestran que los teléfonos móviles son un importante recurso pedagógico para la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del inglés. Los teléfonos móviles son también un recurso que puede incluirse en cualquier clase y no sólo en la de inglés. Al mismo tiempo, la cuestión de la distracción se destacó como el problema más común identificado en relación con el uso de los teléfonos móviles en el aula. Además, los estudiantes estuvieron de acuerdo en que el teléfono móvil había sido un recurso útil de enseñanza-aprendizaje durante la cuarentena causada por la enfermedad pandémica Covid19 ya que les facilitó el acceso a cualquier información que necesitaran desde el teléfono móvil. En conclusión, este estudio reveló que el teléfono móvil desempeñó un papel fundamental durante el aislamiento por la pandemia, ya que fue el dispositivo más utilizado en las aulas virtuales. Por lo tanto, ayudó en la formación de habilidades lingüísticas, es decir, convirtió los teléfonos móviles de los estudiantes en herramientas educativas útiles. Sin embargo, en la actualidad, con el regreso a las aulas, los teléfonos móviles se han convertido en una distracción, por lo que los profesores deben formarse en el uso de estos dispositivos como un recurso que les permita llevar a cabo tácticas de enseñanza eficientes en el aula, utilizando una variedad de estrategias e implementando algunas actividades para que los alumnos utilicen sus teléfonos móviles para aprender

Evaluating cross-platform mobile app performance with video-based measurements

Smartphone sales are nowadays centered around two platforms: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. These two platforms are vastly different and generally a native app made for one platform can’t be used on the other, which means that organizations have to develop two separate apps to reach customers on both platforms. Several cross-platform mobile app development tools have been created to address this issue by allowing developers to write the app once and have the tool work as an intermediary that makes the app run on both platforms. These tools generally work by using workarounds and creating abstractions on top of native SDKs, which can cause performance overhead. This study investigated the performance of apps created with these kinds of tools when compared to native apps. To test the performance of apps created with these tools, a benchmarking app was implemented with five different cross-platform development tools and the native development tools of Android and iOS. The tests measured how fast apps could perform tasks like opening a new screen and reacting to a button press. Collecting measurements that are comparable between apps created with different tools was done by adopting a method previously used to test input lag in games. This method involves recording a video of the device running the test and then the video is analyzed frame by frame. The videos were captured using a high-speed video camera and screen recording software. The results showed that the cross-platform apps often have some areas where they perform worse than their native counterparts, especially on Android. These problematic areas included app launch times, moving between screens and displaying a list of items. The performance disadvantages however weren’t generally significant enough to make using cross-platform tools a bad choice for organizations looking to reduce their app development costs, but some attention needs to be paid when selecting which tool to use

Digital Games’ Development Model

Nowadays technology follows us everywhere. However, and although always present, sometimes technology slips by unnoticed. One field that could make better use of technology is the field of social causes, namely the care and aid of individuals with disabilities. Currently, the main drivers of this cause are dedicated people, doctors, professors, etc., who spare some of their time to aid and take care of this individuals but generally don’t master most of the modern technologies. As such the initiative, Social Tech Booster was created, with the purpose of boosting the use of information systems and/or digital games whose sole ob-jective is aiding individual with disabilities. This initiative is fueled by students on later stages of their master degree, whose final thesis, takes the form of one of these systems/games. Since then, multiple systems and games have been de-veloped, mostly digital games with mixed results, through methods that change from student to student, due to the lack of a more viable methodology. As such, in this document a new methodology to successfully develop digital games, capable of dealing with the difficulties linked to social causes, is presented. This methodology makes use of several proven development re-sources to insure the main beneficiaries are the individuals with disabilities, that will feel an improvement in their quality of life

GlucoServer. Design, Development and Exploitation Plan of a Health Monitoring Network

Projecte final de carrera fet en col.laboració amb Ecole d'Ingénieur ECE Paris.English: In this context, our purpose is to introduce us in the eHealth market by creating a Health Monitoring Network conceived as a service addressed to hospitals. This system will help them to innovate in providing services to patients with chronic diseases, specifically diabetes. The main objective of this system is to be in charge of sending patients’ health information to medical services in order to track the patient day by day, and to give doctors more details about the patients’ status. In order to do this, whenever a measurement will be made by a patient, the result will travel directly to a database where the doctor would be able to enter whenever he wants to look for his patients information. In addition, the system should be able to send an alarm SMS when the patient’s life is in danger allowing the intervention of medical services. In order to make this intervention fast and efficient the message will contain relevant information such as the patients glucose level or his latitude and longitude localisation. Moreover, another objective is to make it easier for the patient to contact his doctor to report some anomalies or just to ask about a doubt whenever he wants

Elastic phone : towards detecting and mitigating computation and energy inefficiencies in mobile apps

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and their ever evolving capabilities are bringing them closer to personal computers. Nonetheless, due to their mobility and small size factor constraints, they still present many hardware and software challenges. Their limited battery life time has led to the design of mobile networks that are inherently different from previous networks (e.g., wifi) and more restrictive task scheduling. Additionally, mobile device ecosystems are more susceptible to the heterogeneity of hardware and from conflicting interests of distributors, internet service providers, manufacturers, developers, etc. The high number of stakeholders ultimately responsible for the performance of a device, results in an inconsistent behavior and makes it very challenging to build a solution that improves resource usage in most cases. The focus of this thesis is on the study and development of techniques to detect and mitigate computation and energy inefficiencies in mobile apps. It follows a bottom-up approach, starting from the challenges behind detecting inefficient execution scheduling by looking only at apps’ implementations. It shows that scheduling APIs are largely misused and have a great impact on devices wake up frequency and on the efficiency of existing energy saving techniques (e.g., batching scheduled executions). Then it addresses many challenges of app testing in the dynamic analysis field. More specifically, how to scale mobile app testing with realistic user input and how to analyze closed source apps’ code at runtime, showing that introducing humans in the app testing loop improves the coverage of app’s code and generated network volume. Finally, using the combined knowledge of static and dynamic analysis, it focuses on the challenges of identifying the resource hungry sections of apps and how to improve their execution via offloading. There is a special focus on performing non-intrusive offloading transparent to existing apps and on in-network computation offloading and distribution. It shows that, even without a custom OS or app modifications, in-network offloading is still possible, greatly improving execution times, energy consumption and reducing both end-user experienced latency and request drop rates. It concludes with a real app measurement study, showing that a good portion of the most popular apps’ code can indeed be offloaded and proposes future directions for the app testing and computation offloading fields.Los dispositivos móviles se han tornado omnipresentes y sus capacidades están en constante evolución acercándolos a los computadoras personales. Sin embargo, debido a su movilidad y tamaño reducido, todavía presentan muchos desafíos de hardware y software. Su duración limitada de batería ha llevado al diseño de redes móviles que son inherentemente diferentes de las redes anteriores y una programación de tareas más restrictiva. Además, los ecosistemas de dispositivos móviles son más susceptibles a la heterogeneidad de hardware y los intereses conflictivos de las entidades responsables por el rendimiento final de un dispositivo. El objetivo de esta tesis es el estudio y desarrollo de técnicas para detectar y mitigar las ineficiencias de computación y energéticas en las aplicaciones móviles. Empieza con los desafíos detrás de la detección de planificación de ejecución ineficientes, mirando sólo la implementación de las aplicaciones. Se muestra que las API de planificación son en gran medida mal utilizadas y tienen un gran impacto en la frecuencia con que los dispositivos despiertan y en la eficiencia de las técnicas de ahorro de energía existentes. A continuación, aborda muchos desafíos de las pruebas de aplicaciones en el campo de análisis dinámica. Más específicamente, cómo escalar las pruebas de aplicaciones móviles con una interacción realista y cómo analizar código de aplicaciones de código cerrado durante la ejecución, mostrando que la introducción de humanos en el bucle de prueba de aplicaciones mejora la cobertura del código y el volumen de comunicación de red generado. Por último, combinando la análisis estática y dinámica, se centra en los desafíos de identificar las secciones de aplicaciones con uso intensivo de recursos y cómo mejorar su ejecución a través de la ejecución remota (i.e.,"offload"). Hay un enfoque especial en el "offload" no intrusivo y transparente a las aplicaciones existentes y en el "offload"y distribución de computación dentro de la red. Demuestra que, incluso sin un sistema operativo personalizado o modificaciones en la aplicación, el "offload" en red sigue siendo posible, mejorando los tiempos de ejecución, el consumo de energía y reduciendo la latencia del usuario final y las tasas de caída de solicitudes de "offload". Concluye con un estudio real de las aplicaciones más populares, mostrando que una buena parte de su código puede de hecho ser ejecutado remotamente y propone direcciones futuras para los campos de "offload" de aplicaciones

Elastic phone : towards detecting and mitigating computation and energy inefficiencies in mobile apps

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and their ever evolving capabilities are bringing them closer to personal computers. Nonetheless, due to their mobility and small size factor constraints, they still present many hardware and software challenges. Their limited battery life time has led to the design of mobile networks that are inherently different from previous networks (e.g., wifi) and more restrictive task scheduling. Additionally, mobile device ecosystems are more susceptible to the heterogeneity of hardware and from conflicting interests of distributors, internet service providers, manufacturers, developers, etc. The high number of stakeholders ultimately responsible for the performance of a device, results in an inconsistent behavior and makes it very challenging to build a solution that improves resource usage in most cases. The focus of this thesis is on the study and development of techniques to detect and mitigate computation and energy inefficiencies in mobile apps. It follows a bottom-up approach, starting from the challenges behind detecting inefficient execution scheduling by looking only at apps’ implementations. It shows that scheduling APIs are largely misused and have a great impact on devices wake up frequency and on the efficiency of existing energy saving techniques (e.g., batching scheduled executions). Then it addresses many challenges of app testing in the dynamic analysis field. More specifically, how to scale mobile app testing with realistic user input and how to analyze closed source apps’ code at runtime, showing that introducing humans in the app testing loop improves the coverage of app’s code and generated network volume. Finally, using the combined knowledge of static and dynamic analysis, it focuses on the challenges of identifying the resource hungry sections of apps and how to improve their execution via offloading. There is a special focus on performing non-intrusive offloading transparent to existing apps and on in-network computation offloading and distribution. It shows that, even without a custom OS or app modifications, in-network offloading is still possible, greatly improving execution times, energy consumption and reducing both end-user experienced latency and request drop rates. It concludes with a real app measurement study, showing that a good portion of the most popular apps’ code can indeed be offloaded and proposes future directions for the app testing and computation offloading fields.Los dispositivos móviles se han tornado omnipresentes y sus capacidades están en constante evolución acercándolos a los computadoras personales. Sin embargo, debido a su movilidad y tamaño reducido, todavía presentan muchos desafíos de hardware y software. Su duración limitada de batería ha llevado al diseño de redes móviles que son inherentemente diferentes de las redes anteriores y una programación de tareas más restrictiva. Además, los ecosistemas de dispositivos móviles son más susceptibles a la heterogeneidad de hardware y los intereses conflictivos de las entidades responsables por el rendimiento final de un dispositivo. El objetivo de esta tesis es el estudio y desarrollo de técnicas para detectar y mitigar las ineficiencias de computación y energéticas en las aplicaciones móviles. Empieza con los desafíos detrás de la detección de planificación de ejecución ineficientes, mirando sólo la implementación de las aplicaciones. Se muestra que las API de planificación son en gran medida mal utilizadas y tienen un gran impacto en la frecuencia con que los dispositivos despiertan y en la eficiencia de las técnicas de ahorro de energía existentes. A continuación, aborda muchos desafíos de las pruebas de aplicaciones en el campo de análisis dinámica. Más específicamente, cómo escalar las pruebas de aplicaciones móviles con una interacción realista y cómo analizar código de aplicaciones de código cerrado durante la ejecución, mostrando que la introducción de humanos en el bucle de prueba de aplicaciones mejora la cobertura del código y el volumen de comunicación de red generado. Por último, combinando la análisis estática y dinámica, se centra en los desafíos de identificar las secciones de aplicaciones con uso intensivo de recursos y cómo mejorar su ejecución a través de la ejecución remota (i.e.,"offload"). Hay un enfoque especial en el "offload" no intrusivo y transparente a las aplicaciones existentes y en el "offload"y distribución de computación dentro de la red. Demuestra que, incluso sin un sistema operativo personalizado o modificaciones en la aplicación, el "offload" en red sigue siendo posible, mejorando los tiempos de ejecución, el consumo de energía y reduciendo la latencia del usuario final y las tasas de caída de solicitudes de "offload". Concluye con un estudio real de las aplicaciones más populares, mostrando que una buena parte de su código puede de hecho ser ejecutado remotamente y propone direcciones futuras para los campos de "offload" de aplicaciones.Postprint (published version