DEVELOPMENT AND USABILITY TESTING OF QUIT4HEALTH, A SMOKING CESSATION SMARTPHONE APP FOR YOUNG ADULTS

: Tobacco use is the leading cause of death in the United States. As of 2016, 23.5% of American 18-25 year olds reported having used cigarettes in the last month compared to 20.2% of adults and only 3.4% of adolescents. Due to the efficacy and widespread general use of mobile technology today, mobile-phone health, or mHealth apps, have become increasingly popular methods of delivering smoking cessation programs. However, there is a lack of evidence in regards to the quality and the effectiveness of using mHealth to deliver smoking cessation interventions to young adults. This study aims to fill this gap to a certain extent by providing evidence for the usability and quality of Quit4Helath, an interactive smoking cessation mobile phone aimed predominantly at young adults. Methods: Participant

Search Rank Fraud Prevention in Online Systems

The survival of products in online services such as Google Play, Yelp, Facebook and Amazon, is contingent on their search rank. This, along with the social impact of such services, has also turned them into a lucrative medium for fraudulently influencing public opinion. Motivated by the need to aggressively promote products, communities that specialize in social network fraud (e.g., fake opinions and reviews, likes, followers, app installs) have emerged, to create a black market for fraudulent search optimization. Fraudulent product developers exploit these communities to hire teams of workers willing and able to commit fraud collectively, emulating realistic, spontaneous activities from unrelated people. We call this behavior “search rank fraud”. In this dissertation, we argue that fraud needs to be proactively discouraged and prevented, instead of only reactively detected and filtered. We introduce two novel approaches to discourage search rank fraud in online systems. First, we detect fraud in real-time, when it is posted, and impose resource consuming penalties on the devices that post activities. We introduce and leverage several novel concepts that include (i) stateless, verifiable computational puzzles that impose minimal performance overhead, but enable the efficient verification of their authenticity, (ii) a real-time, graph based solution to assign fraud scores to user activities, and (iii) mechanisms to dynamically adjust puzzle difficulty levels based on fraud scores and the computational capabilities of devices. In a second approach, we introduce the problem of fraud de-anonymization: reveal the crowdsourcing site accounts of the people who post large amounts of fraud, thus their bank accounts, and provide compelling evidence of fraud to the users of products that they promote. We investigate the ability of our solutions to ensure that fraud does not pay off

Preventing Parkland: A Workable Fourth Amendment Standard for Searching Juveniles\u27 Smartphones Amid School Threats in a Post-Parkland World

On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz, age nineteen, went to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School campus in Parkland, Florida, armed with an AR-15 rifle. He opened fire, killing seventeen students. His unspeakable actions culminated in an attack, which eclipsed the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre to become the deadliest school shooting at a high school in American history. In the immediate months following this still-recent tragedy, schools across the United States were flooded with “copycat” threats of violence. Terroristic threat charges levied against juveniles have likewise skyrocketed. These recent events have resulted in new and burdensome pressures for schools and juveniles alike. In an age in which smart phones and social media are ubiquitous hallmarks of American youth culture, saturating nearly every grade level and socioeconomic stratum, schools must respond to the contemporary and evolving challenge of maintaining school safety amid threats prepared and delivered on smartphone accessible apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Law enforcement officials, at the behest of school officials whose chief concern is to prevent the next “Parkland,” appear to be addressing this issue aggressively and charging juveniles with more crimes than before. Whereas a search of a student’s locker, backpack, or notebook used to suffice, she now carries a smartphone capable of storing, transmitting, and accessing private information and ideas, which exist far beyond the physical form of the device itself. Even when students’ Fourth Amendment rights have been curtailed by a warrantless search of her belongings, rightly or wrongly, courts have been unwilling to tip the scales against school administrators—but smartphones complicate the matter. This Comment promotes a compromise aimed at addressing two timely and related concerns: protecting students’ safety and defending students’ privacy. First, the Supreme Court should enunciate a new standard for searching students’ smartphones on school grounds. A new standard will provide clarity for school officials and students alike and will illuminate acceptable circumstances that warrant abridging students’ Fourth Amendment rights in the name of keeping schools safe. It will also make clear when searches of students’ smartphones become unreasonable and violative of the Constitution. Second, this Comment suggests one policy schools should adopt to best maintain school safety, curb threats, and protect students’ Fourth Amendment rights with respect to their smartphones. These proposals taken together will assist schools in addressing and curtailing smartphone-generated threats directed at students, faculty, and administrators, while simultaneously reducing the number of charges levied against juveniles in a post-Parkland America

Smartphone User Privacy Preserving through Crowdsourcing

In current Android architecture, users have to decide whether an app is safe to use or not. Expert users can make savvy decisions to avoid unnecessary private data breach. However, the majority of regular users are not technically capable or do not care to consider privacy implications to make safe decisions. To assist the technically incapable crowd, we propose a permission control framework based on crowdsourcing. At its core, our framework runs new apps under probation mode without granting their permission requests up-front. It provides recommendations on whether to accept or not the permission requests based on decisions from peer expert users. To seek expert users, we propose an expertise rating algorithm using a transitional Bayesian inference model. The recommendation is based on aggregated expert responses and their confidence level. As a complete framework design of the system, this thesis also includes a solution for Android app risks estimation based on behaviour analysis. To eliminate the negative impact from dishonest app owners, we also proposed a bot user detection to make it harder to utilize false recommendations through bot users to impact the overall recommendations. This work also covers a multi-view permission notification design to customize the app safety notification interface based on users\u27 need and an app recommendation method to suggest safe and usable alternative apps to users

The Opportunities and Security Risks of Mobile Applications in the Context of Local Economic Development

The spread of information and communication technologies has created an incredible level of dependency in societies nowadays. The efficient functioning of the State and the economy is now unthinkable without these tools. It is undeniable that the Internet and ICTs make a significant contribution to economic growth and play a vital role in all social subsystems. People expect technology to resolve the problems they face, most typically through an application for a smart mobile device. Whether it is elderly care, shopping, public transport, or government administration, mobile apps are the first choice for a growing percentage of users. As a result, they are also playing an increasingly important role in local economic development. In this paper, the authors examine the potential for using these applications and the associated risks

Cellf-care: the role of smartphones in decision-making and the formation of health and self

Smartphone technology has transformed the process by which women understand themselves, manage their care decisions and access health information, while also creating a space for more integrated and individualized understandings of wellness. Using exploratory, semi-structured interviews (n = 27) and observation of phone use, this study examines how minority women in Boston engage with smartphones through health-related mobile applications and web searches. Drawing upon postphenomenology, I examine the way smartphones have become both a regulatory force and motivational tool in the formation of self. I argue that the integration of smartphones into user identity positions them as the primary entryway for health decision-making (Garro, 1986, 1998) and patient-clinician interactions