Mobile applications play an important role in the dissemination of computing and information resources. They are often used in domains such as mobile banking, e-commerce, and health monitoring. Cost-effective testing techniques in these domains are critical. This dissertation contributes novel techniques for automatic construction of mobile application test suites. In particular, this work provides solutions that focus on the prohibitively large number of possible event sequences that must be sampled in GUI-based mobile applications. This work makes three major contributions: (1) an automated GUI testing tool, Autodroid, that implements a novel online approach to automatic construction of Android application test suites (2) probabilistic and combinatorial-based algorithms that systematically sample the input space of Android applications to generate test suites with GUI/context events and (3) empirical studies to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our techniques on real-world Android applications. Our experiments show that our techniques achieve better code coverage and event coverage compared to random test generation. We demonstrate that our techniques are useful for automatic construction of Android application test suites in the absence of source code and preexisting abstract models of an Application Under Test (AUT). The insights derived from our empirical studies provide guidance to researchers and practitioners involved in the development of automated GUI testing tools for Android applications.

The transformation of the Swedish Armed Forces is bringing about major changes in many areas. Indirect fire is one capability affected by these changes. Financial savings, a shrinking organization and higher eligibility requirements mean that fewer soldiers will gain access to exclusive high-tech support resources such as the JAS 39 Gripen aircraft and the ARCHER artillery system. This thesis aims to examine whether access to indirect fire capability can be increased through the use of civilian products and communication networks. Technology development in the civilian mobile communications area is exponential and nations such as the USA, facing challenges similar to those of the Swedish Armed Forces, devote substantial resources to research and development. Is the use of mobile phones for military purposes the innovation needed by the Swedish Armed Forces, do the necessary technical conditions exist and is the technology applicable during peace and wartime operations? The results indicate that the military use of commercial technology is too low at the moment, but that the technology itself sets no limits, and that there is a need and a demand to develop military mobile apps. The robustness of commercial networks does not meet Armed Forces’ requirements and the Armed Forces need a clear strategy that states the aims and objectives before procurement and implementation is possible. The results show further that, regardless of the challenges identified, there are good reasons to continue to pursue these issues in order to build up experience and knowledge in this area of technology. The development of civil mobile phone technology for military purposes will mean that there is an economically viable resource to use in the future.

Mobile apps (or apps) are software applications developed to run on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, among other devices. The number of apps has grown tremendously since Apple opened the first app store in 2008. For example, in March of 2009 the Google Play app store (formerly known as Android Market) had only 2,300 apps, and by mid of 2013 there were more than 800,000 apps. Given the accelerated rate of growth in the number of apps, new software engineering challenges have emerged in order to help ease the software development practices of app developers. In this thesis we examine three examples of these challenges, namely code reuse in mobile apps, app ratings, and the use of ad libraries within apps. We carry out our case studies on thousands of Android apps from the Google Play market. We find that code reuse in mobile apps is considerably higher than in desktop/server apps. However, identical copies of mobile apps are rare. We find that the current ratings system is not able to capture the dynamics of the evolving nature of apps. Thus, we were able to show the need for a more elaborate rating system for the apps. Finally, we observe that a considerable number of free-to-download apps are dependant on ads for their revenue. Our findings suggest that "ad maintenance" is a tough challenge that developers of mobile apps have to face. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-04 22:03:54.577

Is There an App for That? The Usage of Mobile Technology for the Purposes of Teaching Health Education in Grade 4 and 5. Wahid Khan. Master of Arts. Curriculum, Teaching and Learning. University of Toronto. Year of Convocation: 2014. The use of mobile devices in elementary schools has steadily increased in the last few years. These mobile devices harness many tools that can help teachers teach classroom material and help students become better students academically. The research question was “How can mobile devices be used to teach health education?” Research was conducted in a grade 4 and 5 classroom to see which mobile apps worked best among teachers and students in conveying health education. Anecdotal notes and daily journaling over a two-month period documented how the students enjoyed playing games and also how engaged they were when they subsequently used the devices for non-gaming purposes. It is still unknown how well these apps conveyed messages of health. How the mobile apps are being used in the classroom and the content inside the mobile apps largely dictates the messages they can convey to the students.

With the development and growth of mobile technologies, mobile phones enable users to perform a number of different tasks with their devices: from sending simple text messages, checking e-mails and browsing the internet, to running elaborated applications. Nowadays, the mobile phone platform creates great opportunities for businesses, especially due to its capabilities and population coverage: the number of mobile subscriptions approaches global population figures. In order to explore such opportunities, most banks have already launched their mobile applications and/or re-designed mobile version of their websites. One of the benefits of using mobile banking is the possibility for users to carry out bank transactions, such online payments or transfers, at anytime and anywhere. Expectations for the adoption of mobile banking were high; however, it represents about 20% of mobile phone users at the present. One factor has been recognised as being a strong reason for users not to adopt mobile banking: their concerns about security. This dissertation focuses on the relationship between the trust users have in mobile banking and the security risks that the use of mobile devices potentially pose. A questionnaire was created in order to gather users’ perception of security about mobile banking, and its results compared with recognised security issues.

Today's phone could be described as a charismatic tool that has the ability to keep human beings captivated for a considerable amount of their precious time. Users remain in the illusory wonderland with free services, while their data becomes the subject to monetizing by a genie called big data. In other words, users pay with their personal data but the price is in a way invisible. Poor means to observe and to assess the consequences of data disclosure causes hindrance for the user to be aware of and to take preventive measures. Mobile operating systems use permission-based access control mechanism to guard system resources and sensors. Depending on the type, apps require explicit consent from the user in order to avail access to those permissions. Nonetheless, it does not put any constraint on access frequency. Granted privileges allow apps to access to users' personal information for indefinite period of time until being revoked explicitly. Available control tools lack monitoring facility which undermines the performance of access control model. It has the ability to create privacy risks and nontransparent handling of personal information for the data subject. This thesis argues that app behavior analysis yields information which has the potential to increase transparency, to enhance privacy protection, to raise awareness regarding consequences of data disclosure, and to assist the user in informed decision making while selecting apps or services. It introduces models and methods, and demonstrates the risks with experiment results. It also takes the risks into account and makes an effort to determine apps' privacy-friendliness based on empirical data from app-behavior analysis. / Today's phone could be described as a charismatic tool that has the ability to keep human beings captivated for a considerable amount of their precious time. Users remain in the illusory wonderland with free services, while their data becomes the subject to monetizing by a genie called big data. In other words, users pay with their personal data but the price is in a way invisible. They face hindrance to be aware of and to take preventive measures because of poor means to observe and to assess consequences of data disclosure. Available control tools lack monitoring properties that do not allow the user to comprehend the magnitude of personal data access. Such circumstances can create privacy risks, erode intervenability of access control mechanism and lead to opaque handling of personal information for the data subject. This thesis argues that app behavior analysis yields information which has the potential to increase transparency, to enhance privacy protection, to raise awareness regarding consequences of data disclosure, and to assist the user in informed decision making while selecting apps or services. It introduces models and methods, and demonstrates the data disclosure risks with experimental results. It also takes the risks into account and makes an effort to determine apps' privacy-friendliness based on empirical data from app-behavior analysis.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

A Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) system is a cloud-based system that is accessed by the users through their own mobile devices. MCC systems are emerging as the product of two technology trends: 1) the migration of personal computing from desktop to mobile devices and 2) the growing integration of large-scale computing environments into cloud systems. Designers are developing a variety of new mobile cloud computing systems. Each of these systems is developed with different goals and under the influence of different design constraints, such as high network latency or limited energy supply. The current MCC systems rely heavily on Computation Offloading, which however incurs new problems such as scalability of the cloud, privacy concerns due to storing personal information on the cloud, and high energy consumption on the cloud data centers. In this dissertation, I address these problems by exploring different options in the distribution of computation across different computing nodes in MCC systems. My thesis is that "the use of design and simulation tools optimized for design space exploration of the MCC systems is the key to optimize the distribution of computation in MCC." For a quantitative analysis of mobile cloud computing systems through design space exploration, I have developed netShip, the first generation of an innovative design and simulation tool, that offers large scalability and heterogeneity support. With this tool system designers and software programmers can efficiently develop, optimize, and validate large-scale, heterogeneous MCC systems. I have enhanced netShip to support the development of ever-evolving MCC applications with a variety of emerging needs including the fast simulation of new devices, e.g., Internet-of-Things devices, and accelerators, e.g., mobile GPUs. Leveraging netShip, I developed three new MCC systems where I applied three variations of a new computation distributing technique, called Reverse Offloading. By more actively leveraging the computational power on mobile devices, the MCC systems can reduce the total execution times, the burden of concentrated computations on the cloud, and the privacy concerns about storing personal information available in the cloud. This approach also creates opportunities for new services by utilizing the information available on the mobile device instead of accessing the cloud. Throughout my research I have enabled the design optimization of mobile applications and cloud-computing platforms. In particular, my design tool for MCC systems becomes a vehicle to optimize not only the performance but also the energy dissipation, an aspect of critical importance for any computing system.

Advances in sensor technology and computer science in the last three decades have boosted the importance of system identification and vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) in civil infrastructure safety and integrity assessment. On the other hand, practical and financial issues in system instrumentation, maintenance, and operation have remained as fundamental problems obstructing the widespread use of SHM applications. For this reason, to reduce system costs and improve practicality as well as sustainability, researchers have been working on emerging methods such as wireless, distributed, mobile, remote, smart, multisensory, and heterogeneous sensing systems. Smartphones with built-in batteries, processor units, and a variety of sensors, have stood as a promising hardware and software environment that can be used as SHM components. Communication capabilities with the web, enable them to compose a smart and participatory sensor network of outnumbered individuals. Besides, crowdsourcing power offered by citizens, sets a decentralized and self-governing SHM framework which can even be pertained by very limited equipment and labor resources. Yet, citizen engagement in an SHM framework brings numerous challenges as well as opportunities. In a citizen-induced SHM scenario, the system administrators have limited or no control over the sensor instrumentation and the operation schedule, and the acquired data is subjected change depending on the measurement conditions. The citizen-induced errors can stem from spatial, temporal, and directional uncertainties since the sensor configuration relies on smartphone users’ decisions and actions. Moreover, the sensor-structure coupling may be unavailable where the smartphone is carried by the user, and as a consequence, the vibration features measured by smartphones can be modified due to the human biomechanical system. In addition, in contrast with the conventional high fidelity sensors, smartphone sensors are of limited quality and are subjected to high noise levels. This dissertation utilizes multisensory smartphone features to solve citizen-induced uncertainties and develops a smartphone-based SHM methodology which enables a cyber-physical system through mobile crowdsourcing. Using smartphone computational and communicational power, combined with a variety of embedded sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer and camera, spatiotemporal and biomechanical citizen-induced uncertainties can be eliminated from the crowdsourced smartphone data, and eventually, structural vibrations collected from numerous buildings and bridges can be collected on a single cloud server. Therefore, unlike the conventional platforms designed and implemented for a particular structure, citizen-engaged and smartphone-based SHM can serve as intelligent, scalable, fully autonomous, cost-free, and durable cyber-physical systems drastically changing the forthcoming trends in civil infrastructure monitoring. In this dissertation, iOS is used as the application development platform to produce a smartphone-based SHM prototype, namely Citizen Sensors for SHM. In addition, a web-based software is developed and cloud services are implemented to connect individual smartphones to an administrator base and automate data submission and processing procedure accordingly. Finally, solutions to citizen-induced problems are provided through numerous laboratory and field test applications to prove the feasibility of smartphone-based SHM with real life examples. Through collaborative use of the software, principles and methodologies presented in this dissertation, smartphones can be the core component of futuristic smart, resilient, and sustainable city and infrastructure systems. And this study lays down an innovative and integrated foundation empowering citizens to achieve these goals.

The diploma thesis deals with the topic of cloud computing and its appropriate deployment in small and medium business. The objective of this thesis is to analyze the offer of Google products and to demonstrate measurable benefits of this solution. Introductory part of the thesis summarizes the history of IT and it is looking for the connection between history of IT and the term cloud computing. This term is described in detail with selected cloud computing characteristics. The main part of the thesis deals with analysis of Google services, technologies and platforms, which could be used in enterprise. The matters are viewed not only economically, but also from the technological and security point of view. In practical implementations are demonstrated measurable benefits of deployment to the Google cloud platform. Finally, the thesis provides the summary of platform's advantages and disadvantages with a description of practical advices for small and medium businesses