27,040 research outputs found
Using Hover to Compromise the Confidentiality of User Input on Android
We show that the new hover (floating touch) technology, available in a number
of today's smartphone models, can be abused by any Android application running
with a common SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission to record all touchscreen input
into other applications. Leveraging this attack, a malicious application
running on the system is therefore able to profile user's behavior, capture
sensitive input such as passwords and PINs as well as record all user's social
interactions. To evaluate our attack we implemented Hoover, a proof-of-concept
malicious application that runs in the system background and records all input
to foreground applications. We evaluated Hoover with 40 users, across two
different Android devices and two input methods, stylus and finger. In the case
of touchscreen input by finger, Hoover estimated the positions of users' clicks
within an error of 100 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 79%.
Hoover captured users' input by stylus even more accurately, estimating users'
clicks within 2 pixels and keyboard input with an accuracy of 98%. We discuss
ways of mitigating this attack and show that this cannot be done by simply
restricting access to permissions or imposing additional cognitive load on the
users since this would significantly constrain the intended use of the hover
technology.Comment: 11 page
RoboJam: A Musical Mixture Density Network for Collaborative Touchscreen Interaction
RoboJam is a machine-learning system for generating music that assists users
of a touchscreen music app by performing responses to their short
improvisations. This system uses a recurrent artificial neural network to
generate sequences of touchscreen interactions and absolute timings, rather
than high-level musical notes. To accomplish this, RoboJam's network uses a
mixture density layer to predict appropriate touch interaction locations in
space and time. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of
RoboJam's network and how it has been integrated into a touchscreen music app.
A preliminary evaluation analyses the system in terms of training, musical
generation and user interaction
Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations
Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified
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Prototyping a Context-Aware Framework for Pervasive Entertainment Applications
Translating Video Recordings of Mobile App Usages into Replayable Scenarios
Screen recordings of mobile applications are easy to obtain and capture a
wealth of information pertinent to software developers (e.g., bugs or feature
requests), making them a popular mechanism for crowdsourced app feedback. Thus,
these videos are becoming a common artifact that developers must manage. In
light of unique mobile development constraints, including swift release cycles
and rapidly evolving platforms, automated techniques for analyzing all types of
rich software artifacts provide benefit to mobile developers. Unfortunately,
automatically analyzing screen recordings presents serious challenges, due to
their graphical nature, compared to other types of (textual) artifacts. To
address these challenges, this paper introduces V2S, a lightweight, automated
approach for translating video recordings of Android app usages into replayable
scenarios. V2S is based primarily on computer vision techniques and adapts
recent solutions for object detection and image classification to detect and
classify user actions captured in a video, and convert these into a replayable
test scenario. We performed an extensive evaluation of V2S involving 175 videos
depicting 3,534 GUI-based actions collected from users exercising features and
reproducing bugs from over 80 popular Android apps. Our results illustrate that
V2S can accurately replay scenarios from screen recordings, and is capable of
reproducing 89% of our collected videos with minimal overhead. A case
study with three industrial partners illustrates the potential usefulness of
V2S from the viewpoint of developers.Comment: In proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software
Engineering (ICSE'20), 13 page
Anticipatory Mobile Computing: A Survey of the State of the Art and Research Challenges
Today's mobile phones are far from mere communication devices they were ten
years ago. Equipped with sophisticated sensors and advanced computing hardware,
phones can be used to infer users' location, activity, social setting and more.
As devices become increasingly intelligent, their capabilities evolve beyond
inferring context to predicting it, and then reasoning and acting upon the
predicted context. This article provides an overview of the current state of
the art in mobile sensing and context prediction paving the way for
full-fledged anticipatory mobile computing. We present a survey of phenomena
that mobile phones can infer and predict, and offer a description of machine
learning techniques used for such predictions. We then discuss proactive
decision making and decision delivery via the user-device feedback loop.
Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of anticipatory mobile
computing.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figure
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