A global measurement study of context-based propagation and user mobility

Mobile phones are becoming a powerful platform for global-scale measurements due to their ever-increasing programmability and prevalence. Moreover, advanced sensing capabilities have allowed mobile phones to become aware of the user’s context, potentially leading to performance improvement. Such context awareness could be exploited to optimize a wireless network connection since wire-less channels are known to depend on the surrounding environment. The viability of context-aware wireless performance improvement would heavily depend on whether differences in context had mean-ingful performance distinction and whether the training overhead per context encountered would overwhelm potential gains. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement study of regional per-formance based on a users context and characterize user mobility around the world. To do so, we deployed WiEye, an Android-based wireless sniffer which has collected over 50 million measurements from over 30 thousand unique users. We categorize measurements according to land use and political divisions to investigate whether distinct levels of performance exist as indicated by wireless path loss. We then examine user mobility patterns via subtractive fuzzy clustering to determine how many different contexts a user typi-cally encounters. Our results show promise for context awareness since distinct levels of performance are observed per land use class with only one or two contexts being typical per user. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Humans and Technology for Inclusive Privacy and Security

Computer security and user privacy are critical issues and concerns in the digital era due to both increasing users and threats to their data. Separate issues arise between generic cybersecurity guidance (i.e., protect all user data from malicious threats) and the individualistic approach of privacy (i.e., specific to users and dependent on user needs and risk perceptions). Research has shown that several security- and privacy-focused vulnerabilities are technological (e.g., software bugs (Streiff, Kenny, Das, Leeth, & Camp, 2018), insecure authentication (Das, Wang, Tingle, & Camp, 2019)), or behavioral (e.g., sharing passwords (Das, Dingman, & Camp, 2018); and compliance (Das, Dev, & Srinivasan, 2018) (Dev, Das, Rashidi, & Camp, 2019)). This panel proposal addresses a third category of sociotechnical vulnerabilities that can and sometimes do arise from non-inclusive design of security and privacy. In this panel, we will address users’ needs and desires for privacy. The panel will engage in in-depth discussions about value-sensitive design while focusing on potentially vulnerable populations, such as older adults, teens, persons with disabilities, and others who are not typically emphasized in general security and privacy concerns. Human factors have a stake in and ability to facilitate improvements in these areas. Reference

Photoperspectives '86

The jurors discuss the selection process employed for this exhibition of 35 Canadian photographers. Includes biographical notes and artists' statements. 1 bibl. ref