>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The importance of mobile technology in improving the quality of life is not restricted to only a Hearing person, and the use of mobile devices among Deaf people is no longer limited, due to the advancements in technology Hearing loss cannot be seen but its effect is clearly visible to the persons suffering the loss. This results in a limited ability to communicate with the large world of hearing people. This research effort aims to design a SignSupport for emergency mobile application for Deaf people in Cape Town, empowering them with the same access to emergency service resources as hearing people. The proposed approach is to use a mobile application to contact standard emergency services on behalf of a Deaf person to a representative. The app will use a phone's GPS module to share the location of the victim and contact the nearest emergency service provider to attend to the Deaf victim; as well as keep the victim’s circle of family and friends informed. The app design is intuitive, simply requiring the Deaf victim to launch the app and choose an emergency type from the available options.

Many modern mobile communication devices are equipped with a GPS receiver and anavigation tool. These devices are useful when a user seeks to reach a specified destinationas soon as possible, but may not be so when he/she only needs to arrive at thedestination in time and wants to focus on some activities on the way. To deal with thislatter situation, a method and device called “Space Time Alarm Clock” is presented forhelping the user reach the destination by a specified deadline and inform the user aboutthe consequences of his/her decisions. It does so by continuously and efficiently computinghow much more time the user may stay at his/her current location without failing toreach the destination by the deadline. Furthermore, it determines the possible movementchoices that a user can make with regards to an underlying road network, it computesthe shortest travel time associated with each choice and informs the user about the consequencesof his/her decisions. Advantage of this approach is that it works completelyin the background so that the user‘s en-route activities will never be interfered with. The“Space Time Alarm Clock” was implemented for Stockholm, where it was tested.

MCC (Mobile Cloud Computing) est un candidat très fort pour le NGN (Next Generation Network) qui permet aux utilisateurs mobiles d’avoir une mobilité étendue, une continuité de service et des performances supérieures. Les utilisateurs peuvent s’attendre à exécuter leurs travaux plus rapidement, avec une faible consommation de batterie et à des prix abordables ; mais ce n’est pas toujours le cas. Diverses applications mobiles ont été développées pour tirer parti de cette nouvelle technologie, mais chacune de ces applications possède ses propres exigences. Plusieurs MCA (Mobile Cloud Architectures) ont été proposées, mais aucune n'a été adaptée pour toutes les applications mobiles, ce qui a mené à une faible satisfaction du client. De plus, l'absence d'un modèle d'affaires (business model) valide pour motiver les investisseurs a empêché son déploiement à l'échelle de production. Cette thèse propose une nouvelle architecture de MCA (Mobile Cloud Architecture) qui positionne l'opérateur de téléphonie mobile au cœur de cette technologie avec un modèle d'affaires de recettes. Cette architecture, nommée OCMCA (Operator Centric Mobile Cloud Architecture), relie l'utilisateur d’un côté et le fournisseur de services Cloud (CSP) de l'autre côté, et héberge un cloud dans son réseau. La connexion OCMCA / utilisateur peut utiliser les canaux multiplex menant à un service beaucoup moins cher pour les utilisateurs, mais avec plus de revenus, et de réduire les embouteillages et les taux de rejet pour l'opérateur. La connexion OCMCA / CSP est basée sur la fédération, ainsi un utilisateur qui a été enregistré avec n’importe quel CSP, peut demander que son environnement soit déchargé de cloud hébergé par l'opérateur de téléphonie mobile afin de recevoir tous les services et les avantages de OCMCA.Les contributions de cette thèse sont multiples. Premièrement, nous proposons OCMCA et nous prouvons qu'il a un rendement supérieur à toutes les autres MCA (Mobile Cloud Architectures). Le modèle d'affaires (business model) de cette architecture se concentre sur la liberté de l'abonnement de l'utilisateur, l'utilisateur peut ainsi être abonné à un fournisseur de cloud et être toujours en mesure de se connecter via cette architecture à son environnement à l'aide du déchargement et de la fédération... / Mobile cloud computing is a very strong candidate for the title "Next Generation Network" which empowers mobile users with extended mobility, service continuity and superior performance. Users can expect to execute their jobs faster, with lower battery consumption and affordable prices; however this is not always the case. Various mobile applications have been developed to take advantage of this new technology, but each application has its own requirements. Several mobile cloud architectures have been proposed but none was suitable for all mobile applications which resulted in lower customer satisfaction. In addition to that, the absence of a valid business model to motivate investors hindered its deployment on production scale. This dissertation proposes a new mobile cloud architecture which positions the mobile operator at the core of this technology equipped with a revenue-making business model. This architecture, named OCMCA (Operator Centric Mobile Cloud Architecture), connects the user from one side and the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) from the other and hosts a cloud within its network. The OCMCA/user connection can utilize multicast channels leading to a much cheaper service for the users and more revenues, lower congestion and rejection rates for the operator. The OCMCA/CSP connection is based on federation, thus a user who has been registered with any CSP, can request her environment to be offloaded to the mobile operator's hosted cloud in order to receive all OCMCA's services and benefits...

This study examines factors associated with the frequency with which users of location-based social networks (LBSNs) "check-in" with their "friends." In addition to a variety of control factors (i.e., sex homophily, race homophily, geographic proximity, length of friendship, and "friendship" type, including non-romantic friend, romantic partner, and family), the central factors of interest were users' background and attitude homophily with, and relational closeness to, their "friends." Results demonstrate that relational closeness and "friendship" type (i.e., romantic partner) were significantly, positively associated with "check-in" frequency.

Detta arbete behandlar mobilpositionering och relaterade tjänster, så kallade location-based services. Syftet med arbetet är att undersöka hur mobilpositionering kommer att utvecklas i takt med att nya mobilsystem tillåter mer avancerade mobila tjänster. En applikation, Finder Client har utvecklats för att kunna visa vänners positioner på en handdators karta. Kartorna som används finns i färdiga ruttplaneringsprodukter som installeras på handdatorn. Positioneringen sker via en GSM-telefon och SMS. Syftet är även att visa att man kan spara data på handdatorn för att göra intelligentare applikationer. Utvecklingen har gjorts i OPL för en Psion 5mx handdator. OPL är inbyggt i Psion och liknar språk som Pascal och Basic. Slutsatsen är att det går bra att utveckla en Finder klient för handdatorer men det vore mer användarvänligt att utveckla den för en kombinerad handator och mobiltelefon, en så kallad Smart Phone. Man kan också tänka sig att GSM-positionering blir en del av ett ruttplaneringsprogram precis som GPS-positionering är idag. En marknadsundersökning har utförts i examensarbetet. Det kan konstateras att en kombination av GSM- och GPS-positionering kommer troligen att vara lyckosammast i framtiden. De drivande krafterna inom mobilpositionering är den amerikanska statens påbud att alla mobiltelefoner ska kunna positioneras vid alarmsamtal (E911) samt att mobiltelefonoperatörerna ser tjänsterna som en ny potentiell inkomstkälla. Det är mycket svårt att säga vilka tjänster som kommer att bli populära i framtiden. Lösningar som riktar sig till ungdomar, underhållningsbranchen och mot att navigera/spåra fordon ser dock mycket intressanta ut. Det är troligt att positionering kommer att utgöra en liten del i många framtida mobila tjänster. ABSTRACT This work deals with the aspects of location-based services. The aim is to investigate how mobile positioning is going to develop in relation to the fact that new mobile system allows more advanced mobile services. An application, an enhanced Finder Client is developed. It uses maps to display friends’ positions on a handheld computer (PDA). The maps are off-the-shelf route planning products that are installed on the PDA. The positioning is made using a GSM mobile phone and SMS as a means for communication. The aim is also to show that it is possible to store large amounts of data on the PDA to make more intelligent applications. The development is performed in OPL on a Psion 5mx handheld computer. OPL is Psion’s built-in programming language, quite similar to languages like Pascal and Basic. The conclusion is that it is possible to develop a Finder Client for handheld computers but it would be more user-friendly to develop the client on a combined mobile phone and a PDA: a Smart Phone. It can also be possible to incorporate GSM positioning into the map software just as GPS positioning is a part of them today. A market overview has also been performed. The conclusion is that a combination of GSM and GPS positioning is probably the most successful solution for the future. The driving force is the Federal Communications Commissions, FCCs E911 decree, which regulates that all emergency calls from a mobile phone must be able to be positioned. Another aspect is that the mobile operators consider location-based services to be a new source for income. It is difficult to estimate which solutions that are going to be popular in the future. Services focusing on the youth, entertainment and vehicle navigation/tracking seems however to be the most interesting. It is likely to believe that mobile positioning is going to be a small part in many mobile services in the future. / Validerat; 20101217 (root)

Depuis quelques dizaines d’années, l’utilisation de téléphones contenant un capteur GPS a fortement augmenté. Cependant, tous ces usages ne sont pas sans menace pour la vie privée des utilisateurs. En effet, les données de mobilité qu’ils envoient à ces services peuvent être utilisées pour inférer des informations sensibles telles que leur domicile ou leur lieu de travail. C’est à ce moment qu’entrent en action les mécanismes de protection, visant à redonner aux utilisateurs le contrôle sur leur vie privée. Nous commençons par répertorier les mécanismes de protection existants et les métriques utilisées pour les évaluer. Cette première analyse met en avant une information particulièrement sensible : les points d’intérêt. Ces derniers représentent tous les lieux où les utilisateurs passent la majeure partie de leur temps. Cela nous conduit à proposer un nouveau mécanisme de protection, PROMESSE, dont le but principal est de cacher ces points d’intérêt. Les mécanismes de protection sont en général configurés par des paramètres, qui ont un grand impact sur leur efficacité. Nous proposons ALP, une solution destinée à aider les utilisateurs à configurer leurs mécanismes de protection à partir d’objectifs qu’ils ont spécifié. Enfin, nous présentons Accio, un logiciel regroupant la majeure partie du travail de cette thèse. Il permet de lancer facilement des expériences destinées à étudier des mécanismes de protection, tout en renforçant leur reproductibilité. / In the past decades, the usage of GPS-enabled smartphones has dramatically risen. However, all these usages do not come without privacy threats. Indeed, location data that users are sending to these services can be used to infer sensitive knowledge about them, such as where they live or where they work. This is were protection mechanisms come into play, whose goal is to put users back in control of their privacy. We start by surveying existing protection mechanisms and metrics used to evaluate them. This first analysis highlights a particularly sensitive information, namely the points of interest. These are all the places where users use to spend most of their time. This leads us towards building a new protection mechanism, PROMESSE, whose main goal is to hide these points of interest. Protection mechanisms tend to be configured by parameters, which highly impact their effectiveness in terms of privacy and utility. We propose ALP, a solution to help users to configure their protection mechanisms from a set of objectives they specified. Finally, we introduce Accio, which is a software encompassing most of our work. Its goal is to allow to easily launch location privacy experiments and enforce their reproducibility.

Les fournisseurs de services géo-localisés (LBS) offrent des données textuelles et spatiales complémentaires, parfois incohérentes et imprécises, représentant les différents points d’intérêt (POI) sur un territoire donné. Ainsi, une même requête lancée auprès de divers fournisseurs de services touristiques peut donner des résultats différents et parfois incohérents, pour les attributs terminologiques et/ou les attributs spatiaux. De plus, chaque fournisseur utilise sa propre convention graphique pour représenter les POIs. L’intégration de ces données spatiales hétérogènes dans un contexte dynamique, large échelle, utilisant des sources incomplètes et de qualités variables est actuellement un verrou technologique. Dans ce travail de thèse, nous cherchons une solution à cette intégration aussi bien au niveau des données que de leur représentation. / Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant geospatial information based on a geographic position or address. The amount of geospatial data is constantly increasing, making it a valuable source of information for enriching LBS applications. However, these geospatial data are highly inconsistent and contradictory from one source to another. We assume that integrating geospatial data from several sources may improve the quality of information offered to users. In this thesis, we specifically focus on data representing Points of Interest (POIs) that tourists can get through LBS. Retrieving, matching and merging such geospatial entities lead to several challenges. We mainly focus on three main challenges including (i) detecting and merging corresponding entities across multiple sources and (ii) considering the uncertainty of integrated entities and their representation in LBS applications.

The mobile and wireless community has brought a significant growth of location-aware devices including smart phones, connected vehicles and IoT devices. The combination of location-aware sensing, data processing and wireless communication in these devices leads to the rapid development of mobile and location-aware applications. Meanwhile, user privacy is becoming an indispensable concern. These mobile and location-aware applications, which collect data from mobile sensors carried by users or vehicles, return valuable data collection services (e.g., health condition monitoring, traffic monitoring, and natural disaster forecasting) in real time. The sequential spatial-temporal data queries sent by users provide their location trajectory information. The location trajectory information not only contains users’ movement patterns, but also reveals sensitive attributes such as users’ personal habits, preferences, as well as home and work addresses. By exploring this type of information, the attackers can extract and sell user profile data, decrease subscribed data services, and even jeopardize personal safety. This research spans from the realization that user privacy is lost along with the popular usage of emerging location-aware applications. The outcome seeks to relive user location and trajectory privacy problems. First, we develop a pseudonym-based anonymity zone generation scheme against a strong adversary model in continuous location-based services. Based on a geometric transformation algorithm, this scheme generates distributed anonymity zones with personalized privacy parameters to conceal users’ real location trajectories. Second, based on the historical query data analysis, we introduce a query-feature-based probabilistic inference attack, and propose query-aware randomized algorithms to preserve user privacy by distorting the probabilistic inference conducted by attackers. Finally, we develop a privacy-aware mobile sensing mechanism to help vehicular users reduce the number of queries to be sent to the adversarial servers. In this mechanism, mobile vehicular users can selectively query nearby nodes in a peer-to-peer way for privacy protection in vehicular networks.

Although air pollution is one of the largest threats to human health, the data available to the public is often sparse and not very accurate nor updated. For example, there exists only about 5-10 air quality measuring points across the city of Stockholm. This means that the available data is good in close proximity of the sensing equipment but can differentiate much only a couple of blocks away. In order for individuals to receive up to date information around a larger city, stationary measurements are not sufficient enough to get a clear picture of how the current state of the air quality stands. Instead, other methods of collecting this data is needed, for instance by making the measurements mobile. GOEASY is a project financed by the European Commission where Galileo, Europe’s new navigational service, is used to enable more location-based service applications. As part of the GOEASY project is the evaluation of the potential of collaborative applications where users are engaged to help individuals affected by breathing-related diseases such as asthma. This thesis presents the choice of architecture and the implementation of a mobile platform serving this purpose. Using sensors mounted on a range of objects real time air quality data is collected and made available. The result is a mobile platform and connected Android application which by utilizing air quality sensors, reports pollution measurements together with positional coordinates to a central server. Thanks to the features of the underlying systems used, this provides a platform which is accurate and more resilient to exploits compared to traditional location-based services available today. The result allows individuals with respiratory conditions to receive much more accurate and up to date information in a larger resolution. It also serves the purpose of demonstrating the potential of the supporting technology as part of the GOEASY project. / Trots att föroreningar i luften är bland de största hoten mot mänsklig hälsa är den information som finns tillgänglig för allmänheten ofta både gles och inte tillräckligt noggrann eller uppdaterad. Till exempel finns det i hela Storstockholm endast mellan 5–10 luftkvalitetstationer som mäter föroreningar. Detta innebär att den data som finns tillgänglig är bra i närheten av mätutrustningen men kan skilja sig mycket enbart ett par kvarter bort. För att öka mängden information som är tillgänglig till allmänheten räcker inte längre enbart de stationära lösningarna som finns idag för att visa hur de rådande halterna av föroreningar står sig. Andra metoder måste införas, exempelvis genom att nyttja mobila mätningar från en plattform som kan röra sig fritt. GOEASY är ett projekt finansierat av den Europeiska Kommissionen, där Galileo, Europas nya navigationssystem används för att tillåta fler platsbaserade tjänster att äntra marknaden. Som en del av GOEASY projektet ingår evalueringen av potentialen i en applikation där användare samlar in data för att hjälpa individer med andningssvårigheter som astma. Denna avhandling presenterar valen till arkitekturen samt implementationen av en mobil plattform som en del av GOEASY. Lösningen använder sig av mobila luftkvalitetsensorer som kan monteras på en rad olika objekt som samlar data i realtid som görs tillgänglig för allmänheten. Resultatet är en mobil plattform och tillhörande Android applikation som med hjälp av luftkvalitetsensorer rapporterar halten av olika skadliga föroreningar tillsammans med platsinformation till en central server. Tack vare egenskaperna av de underliggande systemen som används, skapas en plattform som är mycket mer precis när det gäller positionering jämfört med liknande system som finns tillgängligt. Det resulterande systemet gör det möjligt för individer med andningssvårigheter att få tillgång till noggrannare samt mer uppdaterad information i större utsträckning än vad som för närvarande är tillgängligt. Systemet fyller även syftet med att demonstrera potentialen i den bakomliggande teknologin som en del av GOEASY.

Internet and mobile communications have had a profound effect on today's society. New services are constantly being deployed, in which personal data are being processed in return for personally tailored services. While mobile networks lay the groundwork for new innovative services, at the same time they pose numerous privacy challenges. There is the risk that honest citizens participating in mobile communications will have their privacy invaded for "the greater good". We argue that it is highly important that individuals are empowered to retain control over their personal spheres. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to design and evaluate anonymous overlay networks} adapted for mobile networks that allow users to control which information leaves their personal spheres in a mobile communication. Technically, by using an anonymous overlay network, users can communicate with their communication partners without disclosing their network identities. In this thesis, we propose three different anonymous overlay networks tailored for mobile networks. First, two approaches are proposed for anonymous browsing on the mobile Internet, namely mCrowds and a Tor-based approach. By applying theoretical analysis and\,/\,or practical experiments, we show that these approaches offer an appropriate trade-off between the offered degree of anonymity and performance loss. Second, an anonymous overlay network for use in mobile ad hoc networks - Chameleon - is suggested. Besides the actual design of these anonymous overlay networks, this thesis provides novel contributions in other essential areas of privacy protection and anonymous communication. First, also non-technical aspects of privacy protection are thoroughly discussed, including legal, social, and user interface aspects. Second, we survey existing metrics for quantifying anonymity and also propose new ideas regarding anonymity metrics. Third, we review and classify existing mechanisms for anonymous communication in mobile ad hoc networks. Lastly, we also propose a cryptographic technique for building up the user base of an anonymous overlay network in a secure and privacy-friendly manner.