StoryDroid: Automated Generation of Storyboard for Android Apps

Mobile apps are now ubiquitous. Before developing a new app, the development team usually endeavors painstaking efforts to review many existing apps with similar purposes. The review process is crucial in the sense that it reduces market risks and provides inspiration for app development. However, manual exploration of hundreds of existing apps by different roles (e.g., product manager, UI/UX designer, developer) in a development team can be ineffective. For example, it is difficult to completely explore all the functionalities of the app in a short period of time. Inspired by the conception of storyboard in movie production, we propose a system, StoryDroid, to automatically generate the storyboard for Android apps, and assist different roles to review apps efficiently. Specifically, StoryDroid extracts the activity transition graph and leverages static analysis techniques to render UI pages to visualize the storyboard with the rendered pages. The mapping relations between UI pages and the corresponding implementation code (e.g., layout code, activity code, and method hierarchy) are also provided to users. Our comprehensive experiments unveil that StoryDroid is effective and indeed useful to assist app development. The outputs of StoryDroid enable several potential applications, such as the recommendation of UI design and layout code

After Over-Privileged Permissions: Using Technology and Design to Create Legal Compliance

Consumers in the mobile ecosystem can putatively protect their privacy with the use of application permissions. However, this requires the mobile device owners to understand permissions and their privacy implications. Yet, few consumers appreciate the nature of permissions within the mobile ecosystem, often failing to appreciate the privacy permissions that are altered when updating an app. Even more concerning is the lack of understanding of the wide use of third-party libraries, most which are installed with automatic permissions, that is permissions that must be granted to allow the application to function appropriately. Unsurprisingly, many of these third-party permissions violate consumers’ privacy expectations and thereby, become “over-privileged” to the user. Consequently, an obscurity of privacy expectations between what is practiced by the private sector and what is deemed appropriate by the public sector is exhibited. Despite the growing attention given to privacy in the mobile ecosystem, legal literature has largely ignored the implications of mobile permissions. This article seeks to address this omission by analyzing the impacts of mobile permissions and the privacy harms experienced by consumers of mobile applications. The authors call for the review of industry self-regulation and the overreliance upon simple notice and consent. Instead, the authors set out a plan for greater attention to be paid to socio-technical solutions, focusing on better privacy protections and technology embedded within the automatic permission-based application ecosystem

A gentle transition from Java programming to Web Services using XML-RPC

Exposing students to leading edge vocational areas of relevance such as Web Services can be difficult. We show a lightweight approach by embedding a key component of Web Services within a Level 3 BSc module in Distributed Computing. We present a ready to use collection of lecture slides and student activities based on XML-RPC. In addition we show that this material addresses the central topics in the context of web services as identified by Draganova (2003)

Online Personal Data Processing and EU Data Protection Reform. CEPS Task Force Report, April 2013

This report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such

The patterning of finance/security : a designerly walkthrough of challenger banking apps

Culture is being ‘appified’. Diverse, pre-existing everyday activities are being redesigned so they happen with and through apps. While apps are often encountered as equivalent icons in apps stores or digital devices, the processes of appification – that is, the actions required to turn something into an app – vary significantly. In this article, we offer a comparative analysis of a number of ‘challenger’ banking apps in the United Kingdom. As a retail service, banking is highly regulated and banks must take steps to identify and verify their customers before entering a retail relationship. Once established, this ‘secured’ financial identity underpins a lot of everyday economic activity. Adopting the method of the walkthrough analysis, we study the specific ways these processes of identifying and verifying the identity of the customer (now the user) occur through user onboarding. We argue that banking apps provide a unique way of binding the user to an identity, one that combines the affordances of smart phones with the techniques, knowledge and patterns of user experience design. With the appification of banking, we see new processes of security folded into the everyday experience of apps. Our analysis shows how these binding identities are achieved through what we refer to as the patterning of finance/security. This patterning is significant, moreover, given its availability for wider circulation beyond the context of retail banking apps

Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio

Software solution for food additives management

In a time where society is increasingly interested in what it consumes, natural additives have been gaining attention from consumers and industry. Due to some controversy in the nineties and two thousands, food additives are still viewed with some mistrust by the population, who is largely unaware of their purpose, origin and safety. The information found on the Internet is still scarce, difficult to find, and, in some cases unreliable. Demystifying and informing people about the additives that are added to our table is a responsibility that requires constant, simple and integrative access, allowing the pop- ulation to easily understand what they are consuming. Furthermore, some companies require information regarding the legally authorised quantities of food additives, which is condensed and difficult to access on the European Food Safety Authority website. This project presents a solution that aggregates the fundamental data of food addi- tives and their possibilities of use in an open-access mobile application. This solution is supported by a relational database that stores the most important characteristics of additives and the classes to which they belong, as well as a list of food categories, to specify the warnings and restrictions on the usage of certain additives in some categories.Numa altura em que a sociedade está cada vez mais atenta ao que consome, os aditivos naturais têm ganho maior interesse por parte dos consumidores e da indústria. Devido a alguma controvérsia nos anos noventa e no início do milénio, os aditivos alimentares ainda são vistos com alguma incerteza pela população que, em grande parte, desconhece a sua finalidade, origem e segurança. A informação encontrada na Internet é ainda escassa, difícil de localizar e, muitas vezes, provém de fontes não confiáveis. Desmistificar e informar a população sobre os aditivos que são adicionados à nossa mesa é uma responsabilidade que requer acesso constante, simples e integrativo, per- mitindo que a população entenda facilmente o que está a consumir. Existem ainda em- presas que necessitam de informação relativamente às quantidades de aditivos alimentares legalmente autorizadas, disponível no site da Autoridade Europeia para a Segurança Ali- mentar, mas condensada e de difícil acesso. O objetivo deste projeto consistiu no desenvolvimento de uma solução que agrega os dados fundamentais dos aditivos alimentares e as suas possíveis utilizações numa aplicação móvel de livre acesso. Esta solução é suportada por uma base de dados relacional que armazena as características mais importantes dos aditivos e as classes a que pertencem, bem como uma lista de categorias alimentares, de modo a especificar cuidados e restrições existentes na utilização de certos aditivos em determinadas categorias