PinMe: Tracking a Smartphone User around the World

With the pervasive use of smartphones that sense, collect, and process valuable information about the environment, ensuring location privacy has become one of the most important concerns in the modern age. A few recent research studies discuss the feasibility of processing data gathered by a smartphone to locate the phone's owner, even when the user does not intend to share his location information, e.g., when the Global Positioning System (GPS) is off. Previous research efforts rely on at least one of the two following fundamental requirements, which significantly limit the ability of the adversary: (i) the attacker must accurately know either the user's initial location or the set of routes through which the user travels and/or (ii) the attacker must measure a set of features, e.g., the device's acceleration, for potential routes in advance and construct a training dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that neither of the above-mentioned requirements is essential for compromising the user's location privacy. We describe PinMe, a novel user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory/sensory data stored on the smartphone, e.g., the environment's air pressure, along with publicly-available auxiliary information, e.g., elevation maps, to estimate the user's location when all location services, e.g., GPS, are turned off.Comment: This is the preprint version: the paper has been published in IEEE Trans. Multi-Scale Computing Systems, DOI: 0.1109/TMSCS.2017.275146

Consuming Web Data in a Guiding App for Public Bus Users

The complexity of urban public bus networks in big cities makes their use very difficult. This paper presents Notify.me, a set of pervasive services for mobility that employs open data from the public bus network in Madrid. Our solution provides both a guiding service to assist users travelling by bus and a notifying service (visual, acoustical and sensorial) that informs them when a relevant point on their route has been reached (transfer or destination). Notify.me needs a starting point, which can be the user's current location, a destination and the preferences regarding the best route for the user. Notify.me requests a route from the Madrid public bus company via SOAP Web services. The back-end responds with the calculated route, the user's route, which includes the bus lines, the transfers and the pedestrian routes needed to reach the destination. Finally, an empirical evaluation of the experiences of users who employed Notify.me is presented

CESARSC: Framework for creating Cultural Entertainment Systems with Augmented Reality in Smart Cities

The areas of application for augmented reality technology are heterogeneous but the content creation tools available are usually single-user desktop applications. Moreover, there is no online development tool that enables the creation of such digital content. This paper presents a framework for the creation of Cultural Entertainment Systems and Augmented Reality, employing cloud-based technologies and the interaction of heterogeneous mobile technology in real time in the field of mobile tourism. The proposed system allows players to carry out a series of games and challenges that will improve their tourism experience. The system has been evaluated in a real scenario, obtaining promising results.The areas of application for augmented reality technology are heterogeneous but the content creation tools available are usually single-user desktop applications. Moreover, there is no online development tool that enables the creation of such digital content. This paper presents a framework for the creation of Cultural Entertainment Systems and Augmented Reality, employing cloud-based technologies and the interaction of heterogeneous mobile technology in real time in the field of mobile tourism. The proposed system allows players to carry out a series of games and challenges that will improve their tourism experience. The system has been evaluated in a real scenario, obtaining promising results.This work is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the INNPACTO project CL-SMARTVIEW (IPT-2012-1043-410000)

EYES : a novel overtaking assistance system for vehicular networks

Developments in the ITS area are received with great expectation by both consumers and industry. Despite their huge potential benefits, ITS solutions suffer from the slow pace of adoption by manufacturers. In this paper we propose EYES, an ITS system that aims at helping drivers in overtaking. The system autonomously creates a network of the devices running EYES, and provides drivers with a video feed from the vehicle located just ahead, thus presenting a better view of any vehicles coming from the opposite direction and the road ahead. This is specially useful when the front view of the driver is blocked by large vehicles, and thus the decision whether to overtake can be taken based on the visuals provided by the application. We have validated EYES, the proposed overtaking assistance system, in both indoor and realistic scenarios involving vehicular network, and preliminary results allow being optimistic about its effectiveness and applicability

Tourism and the smartphone app: capabilities, emerging practice and scope in the travel domain.

Based on its advanced computing capabilities and ubiquity, the smartphone has rapidly been adopted as a tourism travel tool.With a growing number of users and a wide varietyof applications emerging, the smartphone is fundamentally altering our current use and understanding of the transport network and tourism travel. Based on a review of smartphone apps, this article evaluates the current functionalities used in the domestic tourism travel domain and highlights where the next major developments lie. Then, at a more conceptual level, the article analyses how the smartphone mediates tourism travel and the role it might play in more collaborative and dynamic travel decisions to facilitate sustainable travel. Some emerging research challenges are discussed

Design of an Android Application to provide Emergency Service

Location based Service have advantages to the mobile users to retrieve the information about their current location. There are many reason to retrieve the information about current location such as finding missing children, kidnapping of woman’s or finding the location of friends who are in critical condition. For that, the way is to find the location of lost person is mobile tracking system. In this one problem is that Client Server system is used to locate and track their friends and receive the alert message This paper proposed an android based application to locate a lost person in real time without using internet. Android application for location based service is based on mobile operating system Android, GPS technology and Java technology (J2EE). DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150312

Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

There are around 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and around 370,000 people are registered as blind or partially sighted in the UK. Ongoing advances in information technology (IT) are increasing the scope for IT-based mobile assistive technologies to facilitate the independence, safety, and improved quality of life of the visually impaired. Research is being directed at making mobile phones and other handheld devices accessible via our haptic (touch) and audio sensory channels. We review research and innovation within the field of mobile assistive technology for the visually impaired and, in so doing, highlight the need for successful collaboration between clinical expertise, computer science, and domain users to realize fully the potential benefits of such technologies. We initially reflect on research that has been conducted to make mobile phones more accessible to people with vision loss. We then discuss innovative assistive applications designed for the visually impaired that are either delivered via mainstream devices and can be used while in motion (e.g., mobile phones) or are embedded within an environment that may be in motion (e.g., public transport) or within which the user may be in motion (e.g., smart homes)

Mobility 2.0: co-operative ITS systems for enhanced personal electromobility

Mobility2.0 is an ITS project aiming at developing and testing an in-vehicle commuting assistant for FEV mobility, resulting in more reliable and energy-efficient electro-mobility. In order to achieve a maximum impact, Mobility2.0 takes an integrated approach of addressing the main bottlenecks of urban FEV mobility: 'range anxiety' related to the limited FEV range, scarcity of parking spaces with public recharging spots and the congestion of urban roads. Our integrated approach means that the application developed by Mobility2.0 will utilize co-operative systems, through communication with transport/traffic city control systems and interaction with the charging infrastructure, to simultaneously consider these bottlenecks, so that such an optimization can be achieved which still guarantees reliable transportation for each FEV owner. The Mobility 2.0 envisioned application acts as a service platform that helps drivers to plan their trip and simultaneously manage the charge of their FEV through their personal nomadic device. This can be achieved by using real time information about the FEV parameters (e.g. vehicle dynamics and energy stored in the batteries), combined with external parameters (e.g. conditions of road traffic, public transport schedules, state of the grid) and learned driver profiles in order to both determine the range autonomy accurately but also provide a multi- modal commute trip recommendation to the FEV user. This paper provides an overview of the project's main objectives and the methodology to be used to achieve them