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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation proposes a framework (TruSStReMark - Trust-based Service Selection and Recommendation for Online Software Marketplaces) to model, quantify, and monitor trust of software services and to perform trust-based service selection and recommendations. It provides methods to analyze and aggregate external reviews, pertaining to specific QoS attributes, of software services by performing subjective logic-based operations. This framework, first, defines trust of a software service using theory of belief and extends the multi-level software specifications to represent the trust-based attributes. It, then, proposes enhancements to two prevalent algorithms for selecting and recommending software services from a marketplace. Finally, the performances of the enhanced selection and recommendation algorithms are improved by parallelizing them. When compared with the prevalent Content-based and Collaborative filtering-based approaches, the results show that, the TruSStReMark is able to produce better results in terms of quality measured using HR (Hit Ratio) and ARHR (Average Reciprocal Hit-Rank) metrics. In addition, the parallelized versions of the trust-based selection and recommendation algorithms improve the end-to-end runtime. The TruSStReMark will enable users to select services, which are trustworthy, from online software marketplaces and use them in composing quality-aware distributed systems.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / With the large number of Android apps available in app stores such as Google Play, it has become increasingly challenging to choose among the apps. The users generally select the apps based on the ratings and reviews of other users, or the recommendations from the app store. But it is very important to take the security into consideration while choosing an app with the increasing security and privacy concerns with mobile apps. This thesis proposes different ranking schemes for Android apps based on security apps evaluated from the static code analysis tools that are available. It proposes the ranking schemes based on the categories of evidences reported by the tools, based on the frequency of each category, and based on the severity of each evidence. The evidences are gathered, and rankings are generated based on the theory of Subjective Logic. In addition to these ranking schemes, the tools are themselves evaluated against the Ghera benchmark. Finally, this work proposes two additional schemes to combine the evidences from difference tools to provide a combined ranking.

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Containers are increasingly used across many different types of computing to isolate and control apps while efficiently sharing computing resources. By using lightweight operating system virtualization, they can provide apps with a virtual computing abstraction while imposing minimal hardware requirements and a small footprint. My thesis is that new container architectures can provide additional functionality, better resource utilization, and stronger security for mobile, drone, and cloud computing. To demonstrate this, we introduce three new container architectures that enable new mobile app migration functionality, a new notion of virtual drones and efficient utilization of drone hardware, and stronger security for cloud computing by protecting containers against untrusted operating systems. First, we introduce Flux to support multi-surface apps, apps that seamlessly run across multiple user devices, through app migration. Flux introduces two key mechanisms to overcome device heterogeneity and residual dependencies associated with app migration to enable app migration. Selective Record/Adaptive Replay to record just those device-agnostic app calls that lead to the generation of app-specific device-dependent state in services and replay them on the target. Checkpoint/Restore in Android (CRIA) to transition an app into a state in which device-specific information the app contains can be safely discarded before checkpointing and restoring the app within a containerized environment on the new device. Second, we introduce AnDrone, a drone-as-a-service solution that makes drones accessible in the cloud. AnDrone provides a drone virtualization architecture to leverage the fact that computational costs are cheap compared to the operational and energy costs of putting a drone in the air. This enables multiple virtual drones to run simultaneously on the same physical drone at very little additional cost. To enable multiple virtual drones to run in an isolated and secure manner, each virtual drone runs its own containerized operating system instance. AnDrone introduces a new device container architecture, providing virtual drones with secure access to a full range of drone hardware devices, including sensors such as cameras and geofenced flight control. Finally, we introduce BlackBox, a new container architecture that provides fine-grain protection of application data confidentiality and integrity without the need to trust the operating system. BlackBox introduces a container security monitor, a small trusted computing base that creates separate and independent physical address spaces for each container, such that there is no direct information flow from container to operating system or other container physical address spaces. Containerized apps do not need to be modified, can still make full use of operating system services via system calls, yet their CPU and memory state are isolated and protected from other containers and the operating system.

Users spend more time than ever on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, while native app development continues to become harder due to platform fragmentation. The web is a promising platform for mobile applications because of its easy access and standardised technologies that work unanimously across many different platforms and operating systems. However, native applications have always had an edge over the web because of important features that have not been available anywhere else, such as push notifications, background synchronisation and offline support. Progressive Web Apps aim to bring the web platform closer to native by enabling many of these important features while still running completely in the web browser, with the possibility to install the application, effectively promoting it to a top-level application. This project will evaluate the capabilities of web-based mobile applications compared to traditional native mobile applications. Three simple proof of concept applications will be built to test the performance and user experience with the help of different JavaScript libraries and techniques for building a Progressive Web App. Then one of the implementations will be further developed and matched against an existing native application with similar features in terms of functionality and performance. The study finds that for this use case, a Progressive Web App may be used instead of a native app without missing out on any important functionality. This simplifies development and releases, by enabling rich code sharing between the different platforms as well as avoiding the app distribution platforms by distributing the application entirely through the web, automatic and transparent to the users. However, this solution means more responsibility in terms of infrastructure for developers to maintain and optimise as the application needs to be distributed by own servers. / Allt mer tid ägnas åt mobila enheter såsom smartphones och surfplattor, medan apputveckling blir allt svårare på grund av spridningen av plattformar. Webben är en lovande plattform för mobila applikationer på grund av dess lättillgänglighet och standardiserade teknologier som fungerar likadant på många olika plattformar och operativsystem. Trots detta har nativa appar alltid haft ett övertag gentemot webben på grund av funktioner som inte varit tillgängliga på andra platformar, såsom pushnotiser, bakgrundssynkronisering och offlinestöd. Progressive Web Apps syftar till föra webbplattformen närmare nativ genom att möjliggöra många av dessa funktioner men fortfarande köras enbart i webbläsaren, med möjlighet att installera applikationen på enheten. Projektet kommer att utvärdera kapaciteten i webbaserade mobila applikationer jämfört med traditionella mobilapplikationer. Tre stycken proof of concept-applikationer kommer att byggas för att testa prestanda och användarvänlighet med hjälp av olika JavaScript-bibliotek och tekniker för att bygga en Progressive Web App. Därefter kommer en av implementationerna att vidareutvecklas och utvärderas gentemot en existerade app med liknande funktionalitet. Studien visar att en Progressive Web App i det här användningsfallet kan ersätta en nativ mobilapplikation utan att gå miste om viktig funktionalitet. Det skulle förenkla utveckling och publicering, genom att möjliggöra koddelning mellan olika plattformar och undvika appdistribueringsplattformarna genom att distribuera applikationen enbart genom webben, automatiskt och transparent för användarna. Lösningen innebär dock mer ansvar i form av underhåll och optimering av infrastruktur eftersom applikationen måste distribueras genom egna servrar.

Geosocial apps on mobile phones use location data to introduce many young adults to other people to initiate various types of relationships. This study examined how established racial preferences affect Straight White Men's (SWM) selection decisions of potential partners in a pseudo-geosocial app when controlling for age, attractiveness, and other profile factors of potential matches. A sample comprising exclusively of SWM was selected because historically, this demographic has benefited most from gender and racial inequalities (Thompson, 2009), and they make up the largest portion of people in interracial relationships in the United States (Livingston & Brown, 2017). We found that SWM were significantly less likely to select profiles of women of color compared to profiles of White women when considering friendship, sexual encounters, dating relationships, or long-term committed relationships such as marriage. Established predictors of negative attitudes toward interracial relationships (e.g., religiosity, political beliefs) had no correlation with SWM's selection behavior in the app, but self-reported openness had a consistent correlation to higher odds of selecting women of all races.

When the Amazon Kindle’s first generation device was released to the entire world in 2007, no one yet knew the impact this device would have on how consumers read. The Amazon Kindle was a pioneer in the soon-to-be wild world of e-readers. Now, in late 2011, there are over ten different companies offering many different options for consumers. How do we know which brands are good and which brands are not? Should we even considering buying an e-reader if the technology is just going to fade away in a few years or will the technology grow exponentially into something we never imagined? In terms of libraries, what does the e-reader mean for us and should we even care? To begin to answer these questions, librarians must take a look at the actual technology itself and how it can help our patrons. This question can be asked across many boards of librarianship: academic, public, and school libraries should all be thinking about e-readers. In a world of little money for libraries, we need to assess each option and consider its strengths and weaknesses for our needs. We hope this article can do a little bit of everything stated above.

Yes / Introduction: Health promotion apps designed to support and reinforce health behaviours or to reduce risk behaviours are the most commonly downloaded apps. Such technologies have the potential to reach and deliver health care to new populations. But the extent to which they are successful in enabling the adoption of new and desired behaviours can vary. Some apps are more effective than others, some are free to download while others require a nominal or substantial charge. Cost alone is not indicative of quality or effectiveness. This is important because the use of health apps by the public will likely increase, as is the expectation that health care professionals understand this technology and its heuristic role in personalised health. Practitioners therefore need to be better informed regarding what makes a health app appealing to service users and successful as an intervention to facilitate behaviour change. Objective: This paper describes and discusses how the structure and content of health care apps can facilitate or inhibit behavioural change. The aim is to support practitioners in the screening and identification of suitable apps for clinical use. Method: Theory and literature review. Conclusion: App content that involved clinician input at the design stage and included internal drivers such as motivation, self-efficacy and illness understanding and external drivers such as illness information, social networking and user compatibility tend to do better in facilitating behaviour change than those that do not. Of these factors, motivation is considered to be the most important.

Yes / Mobile applications are becoming a preferred delivery method for the government sector and contributing to more convenient and timely services to citizens. This study examines the intention to use mobile applications for the government services (mG-App) in Oman. This study extended the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model by including two constructs namely trust and information quality. Data were collected from 513 mobile application users across Oman. The research model was analysed in two stages. First, structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to determine significant determinants affecting users’ acceptance of mG-App. In the second stage, a neural network model was used to validate SEM results and determine the relative importance of determinants of acceptance of mG-App. The findings revealed that trust and performance expectancy are the strongest determinants influencing the acceptance of mG-App. The findings of this research have provided theoretical contributions to the existing research on mG-App and practical implications to decision-makers involved in the development and implementation of mG-App in in Oman.