3,928 research outputs found
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
Leveraging Program Analysis to Reduce User-Perceived Latency in Mobile Applications
Reducing network latency in mobile applications is an effective way of
improving the mobile user experience and has tangible economic benefits. This
paper presents PALOMA, a novel client-centric technique for reducing the
network latency by prefetching HTTP requests in Android apps. Our work
leverages string analysis and callback control-flow analysis to automatically
instrument apps using PALOMA's rigorous formulation of scenarios that address
"what" and "when" to prefetch. PALOMA has been shown to incur significant
runtime savings (several hundred milliseconds per prefetchable HTTP request),
both when applied on a reusable evaluation benchmark we have developed and on
real applicationsComment: ICSE 201
The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences
Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by
prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that
this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the
circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be
vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests
access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the
contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive
resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf
by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy
preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to
automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user
intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the
system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can
accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a
four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
Generating Predicate Callback Summaries for the Android Framework
One of the challenges of analyzing, testing and debugging Android apps is
that the potential execution orders of callbacks are missing from the apps'
source code. However, bugs, vulnerabilities and refactoring transformations
have been found to be related to callback sequences. Existing work on control
flow analysis of Android apps have mainly focused on analyzing GUI events. GUI
events, although being a key part of determining control flow of Android apps,
do not offer a complete picture. Our observation is that orthogonal to GUI
events, the Android API calls also play an important role in determining the
order of callbacks. In the past, such control flow information has been modeled
manually. This paper presents a complementary solution of constructing program
paths for Android apps. We proposed a specification technique, called Predicate
Callback Summary (PCS), that represents the callback control flow information
(including callback sequences as well as the conditions under which the
callbacks are invoked) in Android API methods and developed static analysis
techniques to automatically compute and apply such summaries to construct apps'
callback sequences. Our experiments show that by applying PCSs, we are able to
construct Android apps' control flow graphs, including inter-callback
relations, and also to detect infeasible paths involving multiple callbacks.
Such control flow information can help program analysis and testing tools to
report more precise results. Our detailed experimental data is available at:
http://goo.gl/NBPrKsComment: 11 page
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