A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile Applications

Nowadays there is a mobile application for almost everything a user may think of, ranging from paying bills and gathering information to playing games and watching movies. In order to ensure user satisfaction and success of applications, it is important to provide high performant applications. This is particularly important for resource constraint systems such as mobile devices. Thereby, non-functional performance characteristics, such as energy and memory consumption, play an important role for user satisfaction. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of non-functional performance optimization for Android applications. We collected 155 unique publications, published between 2008 and 2020, that focus on the optimization of non-functional performance of mobile applications. We target our search at four performance characteristics, in particular: responsiveness, launch time, memory and energy consumption. For each performance characteristic, we categorize optimization approaches based on the method used in the corresponding publications. Furthermore, we identify research gaps in the literature for future work

A Mobile Initiative for Waste Disposal in Bringing Awareness to the Damage Littering Behavior Has on Storm Drains

Irresponsible dumping of wastes into sewage processes and unmaintained areas not intended for waste processing negatively impacts the surrounding environment and ecosystem homeostasis of the dumpsite. Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of waste dumping is when the waste, that is improperly disposed as litter, begins to disrupt its local environment, and thus negatively impacting the health of everyone and everything in the relative environment. The overall objective of this capstone project was to develop a user-friendly platform that serves as an educational tool for the public to further improve understanding of waste disposal practices and encourage individuals to work with their communities to take simple steps to establish clean practices in their communities. The project, titled TrashCache, focuses on littering behavior as it contributes to storm drains, which flow directly into waterways. Due to increased popularity in using mobile devices, a mobile approach was produced as a method for distributing the educational material through a mobile-friendly website and social media campaign. A prototype of a mobile application was also developed, which would provide its users with easy access to the educational material, regardless of geographical location and internet availability. Perception of littering behavior was recorded through questionnaires. As a result, the mobile-friendly website and social media campaign were widely accepted and reached over 900 page views, reaching nearly 200 individuals around the United States within a 4 week period. The ever-growing problem of irresponsible waste disposal practice will continue to negatively influence the environment, unless there is more public awareness about this issue

The Case of the Mexican Mobile Government: Measurement and Examples

The mobile government has become a reality in a large majority of countries around the world. The use of apps to link government websites and information is a recent trend that is capturing citizens and public officials. The uses, advantages and disadvantages have recently become a study field for several scholars around the globe. The mobile government is not new for e-government scholars; however, the explosion of apps and the increase of smart phones have created a new trend in the mobile government field. In order to understand these phenomena in the Mexican society we have gathered data from different sources: government, companies and citizen organizations. Based on this information, we analyzed the impact of apps across the country and suggest a classification method that can be used for a better understanding of this new field. We finish with five small case studies, which we consider good examples to be followed by different government organizations. To accomplish this objective we divided this chapter into seven main sections: this first section is the introduction. The second section includes a literature review. The third section describes the method we suggest to classify the apps. The fourth section discusses the findings with the model application. The fifth section presents the case studies we suggest for government apps. The sixth section discusses future research on government apps. In the seventh section, we present some remarks and the conclusion of this topic

Mobile phone technology as an aid to contemporary transport questions in walkability, in the context of developing countries

The emerging global middle class, which is expected to double by 2050 desires more walkable, liveable neighbourhoods, and as distances between work and other amenities increases, cities are becoming less monocentric and becoming more polycentric. African cities could be described as walking cities, based on the number of people that walk to their destinations as opposed to other means of mobility but are often not walkable. Walking is by far the most popular form of transportation in Africa’s rapidly urbanising cities, although it is not often by choice rather a necessity. Facilitating this primary mode, while curbing the growth of less sustainable mobility uses requires special attention for the safety and convenience of walking in view of a Global South context. In this regard, to further promote walking as a sustainable mobility option, there is a need to assess the current state of its supporting infrastructure and begin giving it higher priority, focus and emphasis. Mobile phones have emerged as a useful alternative tool to collect this data and audit the state of walkability in cities. They eliminate the inaccuracies and inefficiencies of human memories because smartphone sensors such as GPS provides information with accuracies within 5m, providing superior accuracy and precision compared to other traditional methods. The data is also spatial in nature, allowing for a range of possible applications and use cases. Traditional inventory approaches in walkability often only revealed the perceived walkability and accessibility for only a subset of journeys. Crowdsourcing the perceived walkability and accessibility of points of interest in African cities could address this, albeit aspects such as ease-of-use and road safety should also be considered. A tool that crowdsources individual pedestrian experiences; availability and state of pedestrian infrastructure and amenities, using state-of-the-art smartphone technology, would over time also result in complete surveys of the walking environment provided such a tool is popular and safe. This research will illustrate how mobile phone applications currently in the market can be improved to offer more functionality that factors in multiple sensory modalities for enhanced visual appeal, ease of use, and aesthetics. The overarching aim of this research is, therefore, to develop the framework for and test a pilot-version mobile phone-based data collection tool that incorporates emerging technologies in collecting data on walkability. This research project will assess the effectiveness of the mobile application and test the technical capabilities of the system to experience how it operates within an existing infrastructure. It will continue to investigate the use of mobile phone technology in the collection of user perceptions of walkability, and the limitations of current transportation-based mobile applications, with the aim of developing an application that is an improvement to current offerings in the market. The prototype application will be tested and later piloted in different locations around the globe. Past studies are primarily focused on the development of transport-based mobile phone applications with basic features and limited functionality. Although limited progress has been made in integrating emerging advanced technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data analytics, amongst others into mobile phone applications; what is missing from these past examples is a comprehensive and structured application in the transportation sphere. In turn, the full research will offer a broader understanding of the iii information gathered from these smart devices, and how that large volume of varied data can be better and more quickly interpreted to discover trends, patterns, and aid in decision making and planning. This research project attempts to fill this gap and also bring new insights, thus promote the research field of transportation data collection audits, with particular emphasis on walkability audits. In this regard, this research seeks to provide insights into how such a tool could be applied in assessing and promoting walkability as a sustainable and equitable mobility option. In order to get policy-makers, analysts, and practitioners in urban transport planning and provision in cities to pay closer attention to making better, more walkable places, appealing to them from an efficiency and business perspective is vital. This crowdsourced data is of great interest to industry practitioners, local governments and research communities as Big Data, and to urban communities and civil society as an input in their advocacy activities. The general findings from the results of this research show clear evidence that transport-based mobile phone applications currently available in the market are increasingly getting outdated and are not keeping up with new and emerging technologies and innovations. It is also evident from the results that mobile smartphones have revolutionised the collection of transport-related information hence the need for new initiatives to help take advantage of this emerging opportunity. The implications of these findings are that more attention needs to be paid to this niche going forward. This research project recommends that more studies, particularly on what technologies and functionalities can realistically be incorporated into mobile phone applications in the near future be done as well as on improving the hardware specifications of mobile phone devices to facilitate and support these emerging technologies whilst keeping the cost of mobile devices as low as possible

Vision Based Extraction of Nutrition Information from Skewed Nutrition Labels

An important component of a healthy diet is the comprehension and retention of nutritional information and understanding of how different food items and nutritional constituents affect our bodies. In the U.S. and many other countries, nutritional information is primarily conveyed to consumers through nutrition labels (NLs) which can be found in all packaged food products. However, sometimes it becomes really challenging to utilize all this information available in these NLs even for consumers who are health conscious as they might not be familiar with nutritional terms or find it difficult to integrate nutritional data collection into their daily activities due to lack of time, motivation, or training. So it is essential to automate this data collection and interpretation process by integrating Computer Vision based algorithms to extract nutritional information from NLs because it improves the user’s ability to engage in continuous nutritional data collection and analysis. To make nutritional data collection more manageable and enjoyable for the users, we present a Proactive NUTrition Management System (PNUTS). PNUTS seeks to shift current research and clinical practices in nutrition management toward persuasion, automated nutritional information processing, and context-sensitive nutrition decision support. PNUTS consists of two modules, firstly a barcode scanning module which runs on smart phones and is capable of vision-based localization of One Dimensional (1D) Universal Product Code (UPC) and International Article Number (EAN) barcodes with relaxed pitch, roll, and yaw camera alignment constraints. The algorithm localizes barcodes in images by computing Dominant Orientations of Gradients (DOGs) of image segments and grouping smaller segments with similar DOGs into larger connected components. Connected components that pass given morphological criteria are marked as potential barcodes. The algorithm is implemented in a distributed, cloud-based system. The system’s front end is a smartphone application that runs on Android smartphones with Android 4.2 or higher. The system’s back end is deployed on a five node Linux cluster where images are processed. The algorithm was evaluated on a corpus of 7,545 images extracted from 506 videos of bags, bottles, boxes, and cans in a supermarket. The DOG algorithm was coupled to our in-place scanner for 1D UPC and EAN barcodes. The scanner receives from the DOG algorithm the rectangular planar dimensions of a connected component and the component’s dominant gradient orientation angle referred to as the skew angle. The scanner draws several scan lines at that skew angle within the component to recognize the barcode in place without any rotations. The scanner coupled to the localizer was tested on the same corpus of 7,545 images. Laboratory experiments indicate that the system can localize and scan barcodes of any orientation in the yaw plane, of up to 73.28 degrees in the pitch plane, and of up to 55.5 degrees in the roll plane. The videos have been made public for all interested research communities to replicate our findings or to use them in their own research. The front end Android application is available for free download at Google Play under the title of NutriGlass. This module is also coupled to a comprehensive NL database from which nutritional information can be retrieved on demand. Currently our NL database consists of more than 230,000 products. The second module of PNUTS is an algorithm whose objective is to determine the text skew angle of an NL image without constraining the angle’s magnitude. The horizontal, vertical, and diagonal matrices of the (Two Dimensional) 2D Haar Wavelet Transform are used to identify 2D points with significant intensity changes. The set of points is bounded with a minimum area rectangle whose rotation angle is the text’s skew. The algorithm’s performance is compared with the performance of five text skew detection algorithms on 1001 U.S. nutrition label images and 2200 single- and multi-column document images in multiple languages. To ensure the reproducibility of the reported results, the source code of the algorithm and the image data have been made publicly available. If the skew angle is estimated correctly, optical character recognition (OCR) techniques can be used to extract nutrition information

Concurrency in Android development – Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava

A faulty concurrency system may have an impact in the user experience of the software product and consequently to the company that owns that product. The main goal of this research is to understand the impact of concurrency in Android development and further help developers/companies to discretise the best approaches for concurrency. The research initially centres on the importance of concurrency in Android applications as well as the main approaches for concurrency/threading in Android development. It further illustrates why some asynchronous programming approaches do not fit modern Android development. This allowed the research to concentrate on the most relevant approaches to concurrency and consequently produce more pertinent results for the current state of Android development. After acknowledging Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava as the most relevant approaches to concurrency for Android (at the time of writing this document), this research moved on with the development of a case study application. This application was implemented using both Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava while reusing as much code as possible. There is a single module dedicated to the main user interface of the application and two modules (one for Kotlin Coroutines and one for RxJava) dedicated to concurrently run the necessary steps for each feature and further propagating the necessary data to the user interface. This allowed a clear separation of the specific code needed to perform the same features with Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava, facilitating its later comparison. The design of this application and its features required prior assessment of common use cases for concurrency in Android to form a fitting case study. With the intent of assessing the impact of using Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava in Android applications, we discretised the main software quality attributes to consider for Android development. By taking this step, we were able to focus mainly on the Performance and Maintainability of an Android application and understand how the usage of both Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava affects these attributes. The impact of each library in the performance and maintainability of an Android application was measured using software metrics that were provided by a combination of static analysis, benchmarks, and profiling tests. The process of designing the set of tests, setting up the required tools and the overall development of the test environment for this research is also explored in this document. The results for Kotlin Coroutines and RxJava were then illustrated, compared, and interpreted to fulfil our objective of understanding if, at the time of writing this document, there is a more sensible approach to concurrency for Android development according to our set of tests. The results for our set of tests and case study application revealed that RxJava and Kotlin Coroutines do not differently compromise the performance and maintainability of an Android application, for what developers and companies should not be limited when choosing between these libraries

The Emerging Internet of Things Marketplace From an Industrial Perspective: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of internet-connected objects, such as Radio-frequency identification (RFIDs), sensors, actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the future internet. Over the last decade, we have seen a large number of the IoT solutions developed by start-ups, small and medium enterprises, large corporations, academic research institutes (such as universities), and private and public research organisations making their way into the market. In this paper, we survey over one hundred IoT smart solutions in the marketplace and examine them closely in order to identify the technologies used, functionalities, and applications. More importantly, we identify the trends, opportunities and open challenges in the industry-based the IoT solutions. Based on the application domain, we classify and discuss these solutions under five different categories: smart wearable, smart home, smart, city, smart environment, and smart enterprise. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and conceptual framework for future research in the IoT and to motivate and inspire further developments. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing research and suggests a number of potentially significant research directions.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing 201

모바일 기술 기반 폐기물 재활용 프레임워크 제안: 캄보디아의 경우

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 협동과정 기술경영·경제·정책전공, 2022. 8. Jorn Altmann.Waste management is a major issue for developing countries. Environmental and public health hazards abound in Asia's emerging nations, especially in those where large volumes of municipal waste are dumped into open dumping sites, roads, sewers, and waterways without any regard for the consequences. United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide explicit objectives and metrics for global waste reduction. These aims include increasing collection rates, promoting safe disposal methods, and increasing garbage reuse and recycling rates. Cambodia, which has a population of 16.72 million people (as of 2020), is confronting a variety of solid waste management difficulties. According to the Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia (TRC), by 2020 there will be 20 million mobile phone subscribers and 15 million connected to the internet. Mobile phones have the potential to serve as a means of establishing contact between various parties. Based on the successful experience, that motivates people to get involved in waste recycling activities, and that really motivates us to think about the potential of using mobile technology in waste recycling activities in Cambodia as well. The main goal of this study is to examine Cambodia's present solid waste management status and limitation, as well as the performance of the informal recycling activities, local government agencies, and contractual garbage collection services, in order to develop methods and strategies for an alternative approach to recycling. This article proposes a new mobile technology solution to enhance the efficiency of the recycling implementation process in Cambodia and also linking the waste dealer and waste merchant for recyclable waste items through a mobile application.폐기물 관리는 개발 도상국이 해결해야할 주요 문제이다. 아시아의 신흥 개발도상국에서는 환경 및 공중 보건 위험이 존재하며, 배출 결과에 대한 후속 대책 없이 도시의 쓰레기를 공공 장소, 도로, 하수구, 수로에 폐기하고 있다. 이와 관련하여, UN의 지속 가능한 개발 목표(SDGs)는 전 세계 폐기물 감소를 위한 명확한 목표와 지표를 제공하고 있으며, 쓰레기 수집율 증가, 쓰레기 안전 배출 촉진, 쓰레기 재사용 및 재활용율 증가 등을 제시하고 있다. 2020년 기준으로 1,672만 명의 인구를 보유한 캄보디아는 다양한 고형폐기물을 처리해야하는 문제에 직면한 상태이다. 캄보디아 전기통신규제국(TRC)에 따르면, 2020년까지 휴대전화 가입자 2000만 명을 달성하고 1,500만 명이 인터넷에 연결될 것이라 예상하였다. 휴대전화 및 인터넷의 확산은 다양한 당사자간의 연결을 가능하게 하는 여건이 된다. 성공 사례에 기반한 결과는 사람들의 재활용 활동을 촉진할 수 있으며, 나아가 캄보디아의 쓰레기 재활용을 위한 모바일 기술 사용 가능성을 증진시킬 수 있다. 본 연구의 주요 목표는 캄보디아의 고형 폐기물 관리 현황 및 한계를 검토하고, 비공식적인 재활용 데이터와 지방 정부 기관 및 쓰레기 수집 대리 서비스의 성과를 분석하여 재활용에 대한 대안적 접근 방법을 제시하고 전략을 수립하는 것이다. 또한, 본 연구는 모바일 기술을 활용하여 캄보디아 내 재활용 과정의 효율성을 높일 수 있는 새로운 솔루션을 제안하고, 모바일 애플리케이션을 통해 재활용 가능한 폐기물 제품의 수요와 공급을 연결하여 캄보디아 내 모바일 온라인 폐기물 시장의 실행 가능성을 연구한다.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Research Background 1 1.2 Research Problem 5 1.3 Purpose of the research 6 1.4 Research questions 8 1.5 Originality 8 Chapter 2. Literature Review 9 2.1 Research Location: Cambodia 9 2.2 Waste generation and composition 10 2.3 Recycling of municipal solid waste 11 2.4 Platform & Digital Transformation 16 2.5 Mobile Technologies in Recycling 18 Chapter 3. Methodology 27 3.1 Research Design 27 3.1.1 System Analysis and System Requirements 28 3.1.2 Observe similar systems 29 3.1.3 Literature review 29 3.1.4 Prototyping 29 3.1.5 Survey 30 3.1.6 Focus Group 31 3.2 Propose Mobile Technology and Proof of Concept 31 3.3 Design of the system 34 Chapter 4. System design and Architecture 36 4.1 Software Architecture 36 4.2 System Overview 37 4.2.1 Waste Dealer 37 4.2.2 Waste Merchant 38 4.3 UML Design 40 4.3.1 Use case Diagram 40 4.3.2 Descriptive Use Cases 41 4.3.3 Sequence Diagram 47 4.4 Prototype Implementation Details 49 Chapter 5. System Evaluation 59 5.1 Questionnaire 59 5.1.1 Theory 59 5.1.1.1 Performance Expectancy 61 5.1.1.2 Effort Expectancy 64 5.1.2 Development of Questionnaire 66 5.1.2.1 Questionnaire for Citizen 66 5.1.2.2 Questionnaire for Experts 68 5.2 Analysis 70 5.2.1 Responding from citizens 70 5.2.1.1 Effort expectancy 70 5.2.1.2 Performance expectancy 72 5.2.2 Responding from Experts 81 5.3 Result 85 5.4 The Limitations & Recommendation 87 Chapter 6. Conclusion 89 Bibliography 91 Abstract in Korean 95석

Rule of Thumb: Mobiles for governance in India

Between 1996 and 2012, India's standing dropped on five of the six indicators of governance developed by the World Bank. Today, with over 900 million mobile phone subscriptions, India's mobile revolution presents an unprecedented opportunity to address this deficit and bring good governance to the farthest corners of the country. Adding 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country can lead to half a point of additional GDP growth per person. Rule of Thumb makes a case for m-governance, and for reimagining the ways in which governments and citizens function, transact and interact with each other. It also explores how, in India and the world over, non-profits and social businesses are marrying the ubiquity of mobile technology with governance systems and processes to produce great benefits for citizens and governments alike. Dasra mapped over 130 organizations and profiled the work of 11 organizations with the most impactful and scalable programs

2023 Projects Day Booklet

https://scholarworks.seattleu.edu/projects-day/1002/thumbnail.jp