With the rapid development of mobile device technology, smartphones are now not only the tool for young people but also for elderly people. However, the complicated steps of interacting with smartphones are stopping them from having a good user experience. One of the reasons is that application designers do not take consideration of the user group of elderly people. Our pilot survey shows that most elderly people lack the skills required to use a smartphone without obstacles, like typing. We also conducted an experiment with 8 participants that targeting on the usability of a daily used application, Contact List (CL), and based on a Chinese language system. We developed an android application that proposed a new method of showing the contact list according to the language usage of Chinese for this study. By asking participants to finish the same tasks on the traditional CL applications on their phones or on our application and observing their operations, we obtained useful feedback in terms of usability issues. Our experiment also tried to find out whether the method we proposed in the new application can lead to a better user experience for elderly people.

The ubiquitous use of mobile devices and smartphones in the United States presents an interesting opportunity for application developers with respect to emergency management. Software engineers from the federal government to individuals have recognized the unique prospect of utilizing always-connected devices to assist in emergency notification, preparedness, and response. The federal government has instituted and ratified multiple acts and mandates with respect to mobile communications during a crisis such as the Commercial Mobile Alert System. Likewise, individual organizations and developers have created mobile applications that access weather alerts from the National Weather Service. Many of these applications utilize push notification architectures to notify users and stakeholders about impeding emergency situations. While most of these applications are geared towards a national audience, there are a few that are highly granular with a focus on the local community. This thesis presents a universal iOS application running on all iOS mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, iPad Mini, and iPod Touch for the Virginia Tech community. The application is highly granular with respect to emergency response guidance and notification by providing clear, concise, and supportive information to citizens during a crisis. Additionally, the application provides another medium of delivery for the Office of Emergency Management at Virginia Tech to potentially mitigate the extent of collateral damage and secondary incidents while saving lives. / Master of Science

The currently mainstream mobile application development became part of several programming classes, and courses are being developed focused on mobile app development. There are fundamental differences in programming topics for mobile, including the small screen and finger-based interactions, connectivity using different communication channels, and a large number of sensors. Because of these differences, there is a need to explore different approaches to teach the concepts of mobile development. Integrated approaches and collaborative learning are key to handle the multi-platform environment of mobile development and the diversity of its devices. One practice that has been used in educational contexts for collaborative learning is Pair Programming (PP); an approach that features two developers working on the same development task. Since it became popular in the 1990s, Pair Programming (PP) has been used by developers who worked on desktop and web applications. During the past two decades, PP has been studied in both industrial and classroom settings. Several studies have shown that PP is a pedagogical tool that can help students enhance their productivity and performance. However, PP has not been studied for mobile development courses before. With the challenging nature of mobile development topics, we saw potential benefits for pair-based learning. To cover the challenges of mobile development, we developed an approach that integrates Lectures, hands-on Tutorials, and in-class Pair Programming (PP) sessions (the LTP approach). Although PP has been studied previously in classroom settings, LTP provides an adapted version that better fits the requirements of mobile application development. Integrating PP as a core element of mobile development classes aims at giving opportunities to students to collaborate, share experiences, and solve problems together. Moreover, providing multiple teaching approaches ensures that students would benefit from the variety of education methods. The LTP approach aims at helping Computer Science (CS) educators to develop curricula and manage classes for teaching mobile app development. / Ph. D.

Active Documents is a technique for automating the handling and control of documents by making them a combination of service providers (mobile agents) and resources (compound documents) in the form of autonomous agents. The main focus of this solution is to provide an encapsulation of documents, including their data structures and related functionality, but also to enable documents to reflect upon themselves in respect of their computational environment, and take actions accordingly.

Education plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of any nation. Researchers, pedagogists, and teachers all over the world are constantly working towards improving the process of teaching at all levels of education in order to help impart knowledge in a more effective way. One of the most fundamental branches of education is mathematics. Unless a strong foundation is laid in childhood, it becomes difficult for adults to apply mathematics to their daily lives. Mathematics is such a field that it is integrated in most of our activities. Fractions, a mathematics topic, pose significant challenges for middle school students Although the students generally understand proper fractions (i.e., the numerator is smaller than the denominator), they find it very difficult to learn improper fractions (i.e., the numerator is greater than the denominator). One cannot do away with parts of mathematics curriculum, just because the concept is hard to grasp. The solution is to come up with alternative methods to teach these concepts, such that they are easier to understand and more fun to learn. This thesis describes a digital game-based solution for teaching fractions to middle school students using iOS mobile devices, i.e., iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. We developed a universal iOS game, called Candy Factory, which runs on all iOS mobile devices. The game assigns the student the role of the owner of a Candy Factory and tasks the student to manufacture a candy bar to match the kind and size of a customer order from a whole candy bar that is retrieved from the warehouse. The game is created to teach fractions based on the concept of partitioning and iterating. The student performs various activities such as partitioning, iterating, and measuring to produce the candy bar to satisfy the customer requirements. The game consists of three levels, which help the student progress smoothly from easier problems to more difficult ones. The Candy Factory game, not only helps students learn the fundamentals of fractions, but also makes the learning process enjoyable. / Master of Science

Group signature schemes enable anonymous-yet-accountable communications. Such a capability is extremely useful for modern applications such as smartphone-based crowdsensing and citizen science. A prototype named GROUPSENSE was developed to support anonymous-yet-accountable crowdsensing with SRBE in Android devices. From this prototype, an Android crowdsensing application was implemented to support privacy in citizen science. In this thesis, we will evaluate the usability of our privacy-preserving crowdsensing application for citizen science projects. An in person user study with 22 participants has been performed showing that participants understood the importance of privacy in citizen science and were willing to install privacy-enhancing applications, yet over half of the participants did not understand the privacy guarantee. Based on these results, modifications to the crowdsensing application have been made with the goal of improving the participants' understanding of the privacy guarantee. / Master of Science

Submitted by Inês Marinho (bele_ballet@hotmail.com) on 2016-06-20T15:13:44Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Awdren de Lima Fontão.pdf: 3467255 bytes, checksum: c628b86f0b320e89d4659daa37a0c5fd (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2016-06-23T18:13:40Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Awdren de Lima Fontão.pdf: 3467255 bytes, checksum: c628b86f0b320e89d4659daa37a0c5fd (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2016-06-23T18:16:12Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Awdren de Lima Fontão.pdf: 3467255 bytes, checksum: c628b86f0b320e89d4659daa37a0c5fd (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-23T18:16:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertação - Awdren de Lima Fontão.pdf: 3467255 bytes, checksum: c628b86f0b320e89d4659daa37a0c5fd (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-03-02 / In a Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO), the software organizations have opened up their structures to external developers aiming to reach goals to ensure the MSECO is working properly, such as increasing number of users, mobile applications (apps) and developers. Thus, the management organization (keystone) must restructure its processes to support external developers and create ways to attract the development of apps. The development of apps requires an approach that allows developers to achieve the expected performance into the MSECO. However, there is a quality contribution barrier, the App Store, the App Store’s criteria do not guarantee that apps certified by these criteria have good performance in number of downloads and positive reviews into the MSECO. It is necessary to consider the developer engagement, the quality of support offered by the organization to developers by the evangelists and the existing processes into the MSECO. In this work, we describe a collaborative approach to support app certification in MSEO defined by pair reviews and surveys. This approach is called MSECO-CERT that is composed by three process (Orchestration – MSECO-ORQ, Support – MSECO-SUP and Construction – MSECO-DEV), including recommendations and practices to impact positively the MSECO’s health. The MSECO-CERT was evaluated with feasibility study and observational study. / Em um Ecossistema de Software Móvel (MSECO), as organizações de software passaram a abrir a sua estrutura para desenvolvedores externos visando atingir metas que garantam o funcionamento do MSECO, tais como o aumento do número de usuários, aplicações móveis (apps) e desenvolvedores. Desta forma, a organização central (keystone, em inglês) precisa reestruturar seus processos para lidar com os desenvolvedores externos e criar meios para motivar o desenvolvimento de apps. Neste contexto, o desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis requer uma abordagem que permita aos desenvolvedores alcançar o desempenho esperado dentro de um MSECO. Porém, há uma “barreira” de qualidade, a Loja de Apps. Os critérios de qualidade das lojas não garantem que as apps certificadas a partir deles obtenham o desempenho desejado em relação a número de downloads e avaliações positivas dentro do MSECO. É necessário considerar o engajamento do desenvolvedor, a qualidade de suporte oferecido pela organização aos desenvolvedores por meio dos evangelistas e os processos dentro do MSECO. Assim, acredita-se que trabalhando na qualidade dos processos envolvidos no MSECO pode-se chegar à qualidade do produto, neste caso, a app. Neste trabalho, foi definida uma abordagem para certificação de apps no contexto de MSECO, chamada de MSECO-CERT. Ela é composta por três processos (Orquestração – MSECO-ORQ, Suporte – MSECO-SUP e Construção – MSECO-DEV), recomendações e práticas relacionadas à fase de pré-publicação, ou seja, antes da app ser submetida pelo desenvolvedor à Loja de Apps. A MSECO-CERT foi avaliada por meio de estudo de viabilidade e um estudo de observação.

Crises are spontaneous and highly variable events that lead to life threatening and urgent situations. As such, crisis and emergency notification systems need to be both flexible and highly optimized to quickly communicate to users. Implementing the fastest methods, however, is only half of the battle. The use of geospatial location is missing from alert systems utilized at university campuses across the United States. Our research included the design and implementation of a mobile application addition to our campus notification system. This addition is complete with optimizations including an increase in the speed of delivery, message differentiation to enhance message relevance to the user, and usability studies to enhance user trust and understanding. Another advantage is that our application performs all location data computations on the user device with no external storage to protect user location privacy. However, ensuring the adoption of a mobile application that requests location data permissions and relating privacy measures to users is not a trivial matter. We conducted a campus-wide survey and interviews to understand mobile device usage patterns and obtain opinions of a representative portion of the campus population. These findings guided the development of this mobile application and can provide valuable insights which may be helpful for future application releases. Our addition of a mobile application with geospatial location awareness will send users relevant alerts at speeds faster than those of the current campus notification system while still guarding user location privacy, increasing message relevance, and enhancing the probability of adoption and use. / Master of Science

Advances in information technology are driving massive improvement to the education industry. The ubiquity of mobile devices has triggered a shift in the delivery of educational content. More lessons in a wide range of subjects are being disseminated by allowing students to access digital materials through mobile devices. One of the key materials is digital-based educational games. These games merge education with digital games to maximize engagement while somewhat obfuscating the learning process. The effectiveness is generally measured by assessments, either after or during gameplay, in the form of quizzes, data dumps, and/or manual analyses. Valuable gameplay information lost during the student's play sessions. This gameplay data provides educators and researchers with specific gameplay actions students perform in order to arrive at a solution, not just the correctness of the solution. This problem illustrates a need for a tool, enabling educators and players to quickly analyze gameplay data. in conjunction with correctness in an unobtrusive manner while the student is playing the game. This thesis describes a client-server software architecture that enables the collection of game-based data during gameplay. We created a collection of web services that enables games to transmit game-data for analysis. Additionally, the web application provides players with a portal to login and view various visualization of the captured data. Lastly, we created a game called "Taffy Town", a mathematics-based game that requires the player to manipulate taffy pieces in order to solve various fractions. Taffy Town transmits students' taffy transformations along with correctness to the web application. Students are able to view several dynamically created visualizations from the data sent by Taffy Town. Researchers are able to log in to the web application and see the same visualizations, however, aggregated across all Taffy Town players. This end-to-end mapping of problems, actions, and results will enable researchers, pedagogists, and teachers to improve the effectiveness of educational games. / Master of Science

Abstract Mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as a substrate for distributed wireless Internet applications. With P2P systems, it is possible to share resources such as data storage space, media files, network bandwidth, or computing power among the devices, which participate in the network, without large and expensive centralised server machines. However, the special characteristics of the mobile environment such as the low computational power, changing network conditions, and limited battery life pose several challenges for the fluent operation of mobile devices in P2P networks; this is also in part affected by the complexity of distributed P2P systems. Software development for mobile devices and the design of mobile networking systems are challenging due to the limited device resources and heterogeneous software platforms. Moreover, the energy consumption of a mobile device, and the network-wide routing efficiency that affects for example the resource lookup performance, depend on multiple variable parameters. P2P application development can be facilitated, however, by using middleware, which hides the complexity of networking from the application programmers. The research contributions of this thesis can be classified into three categories: (1) Novel functionalities of mobile middleware are proposed. One of these is a cross-layer connectivity management framework, which aims to select the best combination of network technology entities in a specific usage situation; the selection is made by logic contained in a replaceable state machine. Another new functionality is a system, which installs a missing application for the user, when the user receives a session request from another user. A signalling system based on the cellular USSD protocol is also presented; the system facilitates the establishment of a P2P connection with a mobile device, whose IP-based network connection is off. Moreover, the suitability of the P2PSIP protocol for implementing wireless distributed services is analysed. (2) P2P-related measurement studies are presented. In them, the message routing efficiency of a P2PP protocol implementation and the network traffic load caused by the messaging are observed, and the energy consumption incurred by the same implementation in a mobile device is measured. In addition, a server-based testbed system used in these measurements is described. (3) Experience-backed guidelines for mobile middleware development are presented. These include practical instructions for software development on a restricted mobile platform, and guidelines and observations related to cross-platform software development. / Tiivistelmä Mobiilit vertaisverkot (P2P) ovat uusi alusta hajautetuille langattomille Internet-sovelluksille. P2P-järjestelmien avulla on mahdollista jakaa resursseja kuten tiedon tallennustilaa, mediatiedostoja, verkon kaistanleveyttä tai laskentatehoa laitteiden kesken, jotka osallistuvat verkkoon, ilman suuria ja kalliita keskitettyjä palvelinkoneita. Mobiiliympäristön erityispiirteet kuten vähäinen laskentateho, vaihtelevat verkko-olosuhteet ja rajallinen akkukesto asettavat kuitenkin useita haasteita sujuvalle mobiililaitteiden vertaisverkkokäytölle; tähän vaikuttaa osaltaan myös hajautettujen P2P-järjestelmien monimutkaisuus. Mobiililaitteiden ohjelmistokehitys ja mobiiliverkkojärjestelmien suunnittelu on haastavaa rajallisten laiteresurssien ja epäyhtenäisten ohjelmistoalustojen vuoksi. Lisäksi mobiililaitteen energiankulutus ja koko P2P-verkon reititystehokkuus, joka vaikuttaa esimerkiksi resurssien hakutehokkuuteen, riippuvat useista muuttuvista parametreista. P2P-sovelluskehitystä voidaan kuitenkin helpottaa käyttämällä välikerrosohjelmistoja, jotka kätkevät verkon käytön monimutkaisuuden sovellusohjelmoijilta. Tämän väitöskirjan tutkimuksellinen uutuusarvo voidaan jakaa kolmeen osa-alueeseen: (1) Uusia toiminnallisuuksia mobiileihin välikerrosohjelmistoihin esitellään. Eräs näistä on verkkokerrosten välinen yhteydenhallintajärjestelmä, jossa pyritään valitsemaan tietyssä käyttötilanteessa paras verkkotekniikoiden yhdistelmä; valinnan tekee vaihdettavien tilakoneiden sisältämä logiikka. Toinen uusi toiminnallisuus on järjestelmä, joka asentaa puuttuvan sovelluksen käyttäjälle, kun käyttäjä saa toiselta käyttäjältä pyynnön ryhtyä yhteysjaksoon tämän kanssa. Myös soluverkkojen USSD-protokollaan perustuva signalointijärjestelmä esitellään; järjestelmän avulla helpotetaan P2P-yhteydenmuodostusta sellaisen mobiililaitteen kanssa, jonka IP-pohjainen verkkoyhteys on poissa päältä. Lisäksi P2PSIP-protokollan soveltuvuutta langattomien hajautettujen palvelujen toteuttamiseen analysoidaan. (2) Esitellään P2P-mittaustutkimuksia. Näissä havainnoidaan P2PP-protokollatoteutuksen viestien reititystehokkuutta ja viestien aiheuttamaa verkkoliikennekuormaa sekä mitataan saman toteutuksen aiheuttamaa energiankulutusta mobiililaitteessa. Lisäksi kuvaillaan mittauksissa hyödynnetty palvelinpohjainen testausjärjestelmä. (3) Esitetään kokemuksiin perustuvia neuvoja mobiilien välikerrosohjelmistojen kehitystyötä varten. Nämä sisältävät käytännöllisiä ohjeita rajoitetulla mobiilialustalla tapahtuvaan ohjelmistokehitykseen sekä neuvoja ja havaintoja liittyen yhtäaikaiseen useiden kohdealustojen ohjelmistokehitykseen.