Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

Open-TEE - An Open Virtual Trusted Execution Environment

Hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are widely deployed in mobile devices. Yet their use has been limited primarily to applications developed by the device vendors. Recent standardization of TEE interfaces by GlobalPlatform (GP) promises to partially address this problem by enabling GP-compliant trusted applications to run on TEEs from different vendors. Nevertheless ordinary developers wishing to develop trusted applications face significant challenges. Access to hardware TEE interfaces are difficult to obtain without support from vendors. Tools and software needed to develop and debug trusted applications may be expensive or non-existent. In this paper, we describe Open-TEE, a virtual, hardware-independent TEE implemented in software. Open-TEE conforms to GP specifications. It allows developers to develop and debug trusted applications with the same tools they use for developing software in general. Once a trusted application is fully debugged, it can be compiled for any actual hardware TEE. Through performance measurements and a user study we demonstrate that Open-TEE is efficient and easy to use. We have made Open- TEE freely available as open source.Comment: Author's version of article to appear in 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications, TrustCom 2015, Helsinki, Finland, August 20-22, 201

Review of medicine registration system in Tanzania

>Magister Scientiae - MScRegistration of medicines is an essential function of the national medicine regulatory system of any country. Since the start of the medicine registration system in Tanzania in early 2000s, no systematic review has been carried out to document the status of the system and its impact on availability and access to quality assured medicines to the people of Tanzania. Objectives The study was aimed at reviewing the medicine registration system in Tanzania as implemented by the Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority in order to come up with status of the medicine registration system implemented in Tanzania, and evaluate how the system contributes to the availability and access of essential medicines, particularly those needed to support the essential medicines lists and standard treatment guidelines