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

Towards secure web browsing on mobile devices

The Web is increasingly being accessed by portable, multi-touch wireless devices. Despite the popularity of platform-specific (native) mobile apps, a recent study of smartphone usage shows that more people (81%) browse the Web than use native apps (68%) on their phone. Moreover, many popular native apps such as BBC depend on browser-like components (e.g., Webview) for their functionality. The popularity and prevalence of web browsers on modern mobile phones warrants characterizing existing and emerging threats to mobile web browsing, and building solutions for the same. Although a range of studies have focused on the security of native apps on mobile devices, efforts in characterizing the security of web transactions originating at mobile browsers are limited. This dissertation presents three main contributions: First, we show that porting browsers to mobile platforms leads to new vulnerabilities previously not observed in desktop browsers. The solutions to these vulnerabilities require careful balancing between usability and security and might not always be equivalent to those in desktop browsers. Second, we empirically demonstrate that the combination of reduced screen space and an independent selection of security indicators not only make it difficult for experts to determine the security standing of mobile browsers, but actually make mobile browsing more dangerous for average users as they provide a false sense of security. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the need for mobile specific techniques to detect malicious webpages. We then design and implement kAYO, the first mobile specific static tool to detect malicious webpages in real-time.Ph.D

On Providing Energy-efficient Data Transmission to Mobile Devices

The transformation from telephony to mobile Internet has fundamentally changed the way we interact with the world by delivering ubiquitous Internet access and reasonable cost of connectivity. The mobile networks and Internet services are supportive of each other and together drive a fast development of new services and the whole ecosystem. As a result, the number of mobile subscribers has skyrocketed to a magnitude of billions, and the volume of mobile traffic has boomed up to a scale no-one has seen before with exponential growth predictions. However, the opportunities and problems are both rising. Therefore, to enable sustainable growth of the mobile Internet and continued mobile service adaption, this thesis proposes solutions to ensure that the reduction of overall environmental presence and the level of QoE are mutually addressed by providing energy-efficient data transmission to mobile devices. It is important to understand the characteristics of power consumption of mobile data transmission to find opportunities to balance the energy consumption and the growth of mobile services and the data volumes. This research started with power consumption measurements of various radio interfaces and investigations of the trade-off between computation and communication of modern mobile devices. Power consumption models, state machines and the conditions for energy-efficient mobile data transmission were proposed to guide the development of energy-saving solutions. This research has then employed the defined guideline to optimise data transmission for energy-efficient mobile web access. Proxy-based solutions are presented in this thesis, utilising several strategies: bundling-enabled traffic shaping to optimise TCP behaviour over congested wireless links and keep the radio interface in low power consumption states as much as possible, offloading HTTP-object fetching to shorten the time of DNS lookups and web content downloading, and applying selective compression on HTTP payload to further reduce energy consumption of mobile data transmission. As a result, the solutions dramatically reduce the energy consumption of mobile web access and download time, yet maintain or even increase user experience

Energy-Efficient Acceleration of Asynchronous Programs.

Asynchronous or event-driven programming has become the dominant programming model in the last few years. In this model, computations are posted as events to an event queue from where they get processed asynchronously by the application. A huge fraction of computing systems built today use asynchronous programming. All the Web 2.0 JavaScript applications (e.g., Gmail, Facebook) use asynchronous programming. There are now more than two million mobile applications available between the Apple App Store and Google Play, which are all written using asynchronous programming. Distributed servers (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, PayPal) built using actor-based languages (e.g., Scala) and platforms such as node.js rely on asynchronous events for scalable communication. Internet-of-Things (IoT), embedded systems, sensor networks, desktop GUI applications, etc., all rely on the asynchronous programming model. Despite the ubiquity of asynchronous programs, their unique execution characteristics have been largely ignored by conventional processor architectures, which have remained heavily optimized for synchronous programs. Asynchronous programs are characterized by short events executing varied tasks. This results in a large instruction footprint with little cache locality, severely degrading cache performance. Also, event execution has few repeatable patterns causing poor branch prediction. This thesis proposes novel processor optimizations exploiting the unique execution characteristics of asynchronous programs for performance optimization and energy-efficiency. These optimizations are designed to make the underlying hardware aware of discrete events and thereafter, exploit the latent Event-Level Parallelism present in these applications. Through speculative pre-execution of future events, cache addresses and branch outcomes are recorded and later used for improving cache and branch predictor performance. A hardware instruction prefetcher specialized for asynchronous programs is also proposed as a comparative design direction.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120780/1/gauravc_1.pd

Technology-Enabled Remote Monitoring and Self-Management - Vision for Patient Empowerment Following Cardiac and Vascular Surgery: User Testing and Randomized Controlled Trial Protocol.

BACKGROUND: Tens of thousands of cardiac and vascular surgeries (CaVS) are performed on seniors in Canada and the United Kingdom each year to improve survival, relieve disease symptoms, and improve health-related quality of life (HRQL). However, chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP), undetected or delayed detection of hemodynamic compromise, complications, and related poor functional status are major problems for substantial numbers of patients during the recovery process. To tackle this problem, we aim to refine and test the effectiveness of an eHealth-enabled service delivery intervention, TecHnology-Enabled remote monitoring and Self-MAnagemenT-VIsion for patient EmpoWerment following Cardiac and VasculaR surgery (THE SMArTVIEW, CoVeRed), which combines remote monitoring, education, and self-management training to optimize recovery outcomes and experience of seniors undergoing CaVS in Canada and the United Kingdom. OBJECTIVE: Our objectives are to (1) refine SMArTVIEW via high-fidelity user testing and (2) examine the effectiveness of SMArTVIEW via a randomized controlled trial (RCT). METHODS: CaVS patients and clinicians will engage in two cycles of focus groups and usability testing at each site; feedback will be elicited about expectations and experience of SMArTVIEW, in context. The data will be used to refine the SMArTVIEW eHealth delivery program. Upon transfer to the surgical ward (ie, post-intensive care unit [ICU]), 256 CaVS patients will be reassessed postoperatively and randomly allocated via an interactive Web randomization system to the intervention group or usual care. The SMArTVIEW intervention will run from surgical ward day 2 until 8 weeks following surgery. Outcome assessments will occur on postoperative day 30; at week 8; and at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months. The primary outcome is worst postop pain intensity upon movement in the previous 24 hours (Brief Pain Inventory-Short Form), averaged across the previous 14 days. Secondary outcomes include a composite of postoperative complications related to hemodynamic compromise-death, myocardial infarction, and nonfatal stroke- all-cause mortality and surgical site infections, functional status (Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-12), depressive symptoms (Geriatric Depression Scale), health service utilization-related costs (health service utilization data from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences data repository), and patient-level cost of recovery (Ambulatory Home Care Record). A linear mixed model will be used to assess the effects of the intervention on the primary outcome, with an a priori contrast of weekly average worst pain intensity upon movement to evaluate the primary endpoint of pain at 8 weeks postoperation. We will also examine the incremental cost of the intervention compared to usual care using a regression model to estimate the difference in expected health care costs between groups. RESULTS: Study start-up is underway and usability testing is scheduled to begin in the fall of 2016. CONCLUSIONS: Given our experience, dedicated industry partners, and related RCT infrastructure, we are confident we can make a lasting contribution to improving the care of seniors who undergo CaVS