D-Tags Design by Combining Bluetooth Router, IoT, and Mobile Phone to Track Personal Items

Losing personal items such as a wallet or room keys is disturbing. Problems arise when clues to find the item are lacking or even non-existent. Of one hundred-two people who filled out the questionnaire about how often losing their belongings, 76% had experienced it. Because of that, it must be hard to remember where the last they put the stuff. Therefore people need tools that can help them easily find their item with a transmitter and connect to a mobile phone. Previous research showed that the transmitter with a frequency system had a detection distance of only 5 meters. From this weakness, the authors propose the development of a tracking items device that combines an Internet of Things-based Bluetooth transmitter and receiver system approach called D-Tags by combining Bluetooth routers, IoT, and mobile phones. The system is designed for both indoor and outdoor areas. Bluetooth testing allows the device to detect items up to 7.43 meters without wall obstacles. The system provided location information such as Living Room or Bedroom and the coordinates when outside the room. Regarding time, a single detection item is faster in the range of 15.13 seconds to 15.60 seconds than searching for two things simultaneously. From the tracking radius of the outdoor area, the device can track items up to 31.8 meters from the last item's position. All information tracking history can be seen on the web application. The experiment results prove that D-Tags can be used to track items by indicating their location and with a relatively short search duration

Effective memory management for mobile environments

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices exhibit vastly different constraints compared to regular or classic computing environments like desktops, laptops, or servers. Mobile devices run dozens of so-called “apps” hosted by independent virtual machines (VM). All these VMs run concurrently and each VM deploys purely local heuristics to organize resources like memory, performance, and power. Such a design causes conflicts across all layers of the software stack, calling for the evaluation of VMs and the optimization techniques specific for mobile frameworks. In this dissertation, we study the design of managed runtime systems for mobile platforms. More specifically, we deepen the understanding of interactions between garbage collection (GC) and system layers. We develop tools to monitor the memory behavior of Android-based apps and to characterize GC performance, leading to the development of new techniques for memory management that address energy constraints, time performance, and responsiveness. We implement a GC-aware frequency scaling governor for Android devices. We also explore the tradeoffs of power and performance in vivo for a range of realistic GC variants, with established benchmarks and real applications running on Android virtual machines. We control for variation due to dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), Just-in-time (JIT) compilation, and across established dimensions of heap memory size and concurrency. Finally, we provision GC as a global service that collects statistics from all running VMs and then makes an informed decision that optimizes across all them (and not just locally), and across all layers of the stack. Our evaluation illustrates the power of such a central coordination service and garbage collection mechanism in improving memory utilization, throughput, and adaptability to user activities. In fact, our techniques aim at a sweet spot, where total on-chip energy is reduced (20–30%) with minimal impact on throughput and responsiveness (5–10%). The simplicity and efficacy of our approach reaches well beyond the usual optimization techniques

SmartBin: An Approach to Smart Living Community Using IoT Techniques and Tools

Nowadays, individuals are getting steadily dynamic in achieving the possible ways to clean their environment. The concerned teams have initiated other developments to build tidiness. Previously, prior data on filling the trash container was required, which cautions and sends cautioning messages to the city workers for cleaning the trash receptacle on schedule and protecting the city. In this framework, numerous dustbins through urban areas from various regions are associated with utilizing IoT innovation. This program can be used conveniently to verify the status of the dust bin, the garbage in the dust containers, clean the dust bin on time, and maintain the atmosphere's safety and prevent contamination from overflows from the dust containers. So, people don't have to test everyone's work manually, so they'll get a warning if the container is full. A sensor over the garbage container would be placed to detect the full amount of waste, and when it exceeds the excessive volume, a warning will be transmitted to the company office. The proposed framework based on Arduino IDE, cloud computing concept and Load Sensor will help clean any city. Load Sensors are utilized to distinguish the dimension of trash gathered in the containers. The application also gets Latitude and Longitude estimations of the territory where the Garbage Bins are put

Optimized Planning and Management of Domiciliary and Selective Solid Waste: Results of Application in Brazilian Cities (SisRot^®Lix)

We show a new technology to manage solid waste services through optimization methods (on sectoring, routing costs, and resources). This technology is called optimized planning and integrated logistics management (OPILM). It is being applied to Brazilian municipalities as it attends to their major natural features. The technology is formed by a framework of computational systems that uses optimization methods from sector arc routing and scheduling, fleet and staff scheduling, using also mobile smartphone apps. We present some of the results of real cases evaluated for residential refuse collection and selective waste collection in two Brazilian cities (Petrópolis/RJ and Bom Jesus dos Perdões/SP). The plan implementations achieved 17.9% from actual fixed and variable cost savings for sectors (vehicles and workers) and routes (time and distances) for residential refuse collection in Petrópolis/RJ. For the selective waste collection, we detail how we made our project to Bom Jesus dos Perdões/SP. We also present the returns considering costs involved in the management of the operational level and amortized by the investment required to use and apply the proposed technology for Petrópolis/SP

HideMyApp : Hiding the Presence of Sensitive Apps on Android

Millions of users rely on mobile health (mHealth) apps to manage their wellness and medical conditions. Although the popularity of such apps continues to grow, several privacy and security challenges can hinder their potential. In particular, the simple fact that an mHealth app is installed on a user’s phone can reveal sensitive information about the user’s health. Due to Android’s open design, any app, even without per- missions, can easily check for the presence of a specific app or collect the entire list of installed apps on the phone. Our analysis shows that Android apps expose a significant amount of metadata, which facilitates fingerprinting them. Many third parties are interested in such information: Our survey of 2917 popular apps in the Google Play Store shows that around 57% of these apps explicitly query for the list of installed apps. Therefore, we designed and implemented HideMyApp (HMA), an effective and practical solution for hiding the presence of sensitive apps from other apps. HMA does not require any changes to the Android operating system or to apps yet still supports their key functionalities. By using a diverse dataset of both free and paid mHealth apps, our experimental eval- uation shows that HMA supports the main functionalities in most apps and introduces acceptable overheads at runtime (i.e., several milliseconds); these findings were validated by our user-study (N = 30). In short, we show that the practice of collecting information about installed apps is widespread and that our solution, HMA, provides a robust protection against such a threat

Using attitudes and green consciousness as a determinant of travel behaviour and market segmentation

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

You Can’t Teach Old Katz New Tricks: It’s Time to Revitalize the Fourth Amendment

For over half a century, the Court’s decision in Katz v. United States has been the lodestar for applying the Fourth Amendment. The Katz test has produced a litany of confusing and irreconcilable decisions in which the Court has carved exceptions into the doctrine and then carved exceptions into the exceptions. These decisions often leave lower courts with minimal guidance on how to apply the framework to new sets of facts and leave legal scholars and commenters befuddled and frustrated with the Court’s explanations for the rulings. The Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States represents the apex of Katz’s unclear standard, counterintuitive application, and lack of guidance for lower courts. This Note examines the evolution of the Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence both before and after the Katz decision and argues that the Carpenter decision epitomizes Katz’s legacy as a flawed precedent that is incapable of adequately applying the Fourth Amendment to new sets of facts in the twenty-first century and beyond. This Note further argues that Katz should be abandoned as the Fourth Amendment standard in lieu of a hybrid approach that combines privacy and property protections and incorporates positive law in determining the scope of the Fourth Amendment

Exploiting intrinsic flash properties to enhance modern storage systems

The longstanding goals of storage system design have been to provide simple abstractions for applications to efficiently access data while ensuring the data durability and security on a hardware device. The traditional storage system, which was designed for slow hard disk drive with little parallelism, does not fit for the new storage technologies such as the faster flash memory with high internal parallelism. The gap between the storage system software and flash device causes both resource inefficiency and sub-optimal performance. This dissertation focuses on the rethinking of the storage system design for flash memory with a holistic approach from the system level to the device level and revisits several critical aspects of the storage system design including the storage performance, performance isolation, energy-efficiency, and data security. The traditional storage system lacks full performance isolation between applications sharing the device because it does not make the software aware of the underlying flash properties and constraints. This dissertation proposes FlashBlox, a storage virtualization system that utilizes flash parallelism to provide hardware isolation between applications by assigning them on dedicated chips. FlashBlox reduces the tail latency of storage operations dramatically compared with the existing software-based isolation techniques while achieving uniform lifetime for the flash device. As the underlying flash device latency is reduced significantly compared to the conventional hard disk drive, the storage software overhead has become the major bottleneck. This dissertation presents FlashMap, a holistic flash-based storage stack that combines memory, storage and device-level indirections into a unified layer. By combining these layers, FlashMap reduces critical-path latency for accessing data in the flash device and improves DRAM caching efficiency significantly for flash management. The traditional storage software incurs energy-intensive storage operations due to the need for maintaining data durability and security for personal data, which has become a significant challenge for resource-constrained devices such as mobiles and wearables. This dissertation proposes WearDrive, a fast and energy-efficient storage system for wearables. WearDrive treats the battery-backed DRAM as non-volatile memory to store personal data and trades the connected phone’s battery for the wearable’s by performing large and energy-intensive tasks on the phone while performing small and energy-efficient tasks locally using battery-backed DRAM. WearDrive improves wearable’s battery life significantly with negligible impact to the phone’s battery life. The storage software which has been developed for decades is still vulnerable to malware attacks. For example, the encryption ransomware which is a malicious software that stealthily encrypts user files and demands a ransom to provide access to these files. Prior solutions such as ransomware detection and data backups have been proposed to defend against encryption ransomware. Unfortunately, by the time the ransomware is detected, some files already undergo encryption and the user is still required to pay a ransom to access those files. Furthermore, ransomware variants can obtain kernel privilege to terminate or destroy these software-based defense systems. This dissertation presents FlashGuard, a ransomware-tolerant SSD which has a firmware-level recovery system that allows effective data recovery from encryption ransomware. FlashGuard leverages the intrinsic flash properties to defend against the encryption ransomware and adds minimal overhead to regular storage operations.Ph.D