Design and implementation of an Android library for supporting network-aware applications

In the last years, research about context-aware systems has been particularly intense. Nevertheless, most of the proposed approaches and systems failed to flow from research to the industrial world. We propose ANARC a library that eases the development of network aware applications for smartphones. ANARC does not try to cope with all the possible meanings and variations of context, it instead focuses on a specific restriction of context: the network and associated properties. To make things easier for designers and developers, ANARC adopts a rule and trigger based approach: when the network context matches the one described in a rule, the corresponding notification is sent to the application level. Examples of use of the proposed library are also included

Lessons learned from the design, implementation, and management of a smartphone-based crowdsourcing system

Ubiquitousness of smartphones, when combined with the power of crowdsourcing, enables radically novel application scenarios, where a massive amount of mobile users scattered over wide geographical regions cooperate towards a single goal. Nevertheless these new possibilities come at the cost of additional complexity, such as the presence of humans in the control loop, scarce resources of mobile devices, increased management costs due the large number of users. In this paper we report and discuss the lessons learned from the design, implementation and management of Portolan, a smartphone-based crowdsourcing system aimed at monitoring large-scale networks