archives@tulane.edu / This study is a process evaluation-based case study of the Universal App Program (UAP), a global disaster preparedness smartphone application program developed and managed by the Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC). The rise of disaster risks worldwide and the rapid parallel adoption of mobile technology have created opportunities to empower communities to prepare and respond more effectively to disasters. The deployment of ICTs in the humanitarian sphere requires focused research to best understand how these opportunities can be harnessed more effectively. This study explores, describes, and analyzes the phases of design, delivery, and initial receipt of apps developed with the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. It study also explores and describes the strategies, implementation and outcomes of these processes, focusing on the perspectives of the various actors working with and on the apps throughout these processes and at each site. The goal is to understand how these apps are conceived and planned, what contextual factors are significant, and within what organizational and country context, and under what assumptions, how the apps are adapted for the needs and contexts of each country involved and its citizenry, and what challenges are faced, with emphasis on the design and delivery phases. The study is both descriptive and prescriptive, utilizing methods of qualitative data collection, primarily in the form of questionnaires, interviews, and document reviews, with the support of some basic quantitative data analysis. The primary findings of this study show that there is a great deal of fidelity between the GDPC’s design of the UAP and that the demand-driven, shared responsibility model of the program has been key to its sustainability. Program designers were successful in incorporating key aspects of ICT4D best practice into the components of the program. Contextual factors, in particular the UAP situated within the GDPC and aligning with the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement has been a key underlying factor for program development and success, as it enabled GDPC to build on the experiences and apps of the British Red Cross and American Red Cross and uniquely connect and support national societies participating in the UAP. / 1 / Jessica Ports Robbins

Smartphones have facilitated tasks in private and work life for its users. In business, employees often should manage sensitive data that unauthorised people cannot access, so some user authentication is needed to perform. Besides the normal user authentication, some employers give the right to access to the sensitive data only if the employees stay in specific locations. That makes sense for those businesses that have various construction sites and offices that are not necessarily located in the same geographical region. In those companies, the employees must be able to perform their tasks from different locations regardless of the available network infrastructure. To protect the data from intruders, this research presents a secure location-based user authentication scheme for mobile application that works offline. This research considers to enable access to the sensitive data using off-the-shelf mobile devices without adding any extra hardware and with no additional information from a fixed infrastructure. This Thesis firstly describes the architecture and attributes of the proposed solution. Then, the techniques used for the design and functionality of the solution are presented. The results of this study reveal that the proposed solution is more suitable for the applications that is used in outdoor locations. Finally, to alleviate the shortcoming of the presented technique for indoor locations, a new method has been discussed and tested. This report is a final Thesis in collaboration with SAAB. The purpose of this research is to examine the best way to protect sensitive data managed by the employees using their smartphones in different workplaces.

Modern smartphone operating systems (OSs) have been developed with a greater emphasis on security and protecting privacy. One of the security mechanisms these systems use is permission system. We perform an analysis of the Android permission system in an attempt to begin answering some of the questions that have arisen about its design and implementation. We developed PScout, a tool that extracts the permission specification from the Android OS source code using static analysis and analyzed 5 versions of Android spanning version 2.2 up to the recently released Android 4.1. Our main findings are that while there is little redundancy in the permission specification, if applications could be constrained to only use documented APIs, then about 18-26% of the non-system permissions can be hidden. Finally, we find that a trade-off exists between enabling least-privilege security with fine-grained permissions and maintaining stability of the permission specification as the Android OS evolves.

No description available.

A wide variety of smartphone applications today rely on third-party advertising services, which provide libraries that are linked into the hosting application. This situation is undesirable for both the application author and the advertiser. Advertising libraries require additional permissions, resulting in additional permission requests to users. Likewise, a malicious application could simulate the behavior of the advertising library, forging the user's interaction and effectively stealing money from the advertiser. This thesis describes AdSplit, where we extended Android to allow an application and its advertising to run as separate processes, under separate user-ids, eliminating the need for applications to request permissions on behalf of their advertising libraries. We also leverage mechanisms from QUIRE to allow the remote server to validate the authenticity of client-side behavior. In this thesis, we quantify the degree of permission bloat caused by advertising, with a study of thousands of downloaded apps. AdSplit automatically recompiles apps to extract their ad services, and we measure minimal runtime overhead. We also observe that most ad libraries just embed an HTML widget within and describe how AdSplit can be designed with this in mind to avoid any need for ads to have native code.

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Denna uppsats ämnar redogöra olika för- och nackdelar med 4G ur ett användarperspektiv, där fokus ligger på smartphoneanvändare. Ett kvalitativt synsätt har tillämpats samt en blandning av deduktivt och induktivt synsätt, där det deduktiva synsättet är det övergripande. Primärdata består av intervjuer och enkätundersökningar. Sekundärdata består främst av akademiska, utvärderade journaler. Studiens syfte identifierades när vi tyckte oss finna en tydlig brist i kunskap bland användare om vad 4G faktiskt är. Med det i åtanke ämnar vi stänga gapet mellan det rent tekniska bakom 4G och användarnas förståelse av det. Som resultat identifierar vi användningsområden som med tidigare teknik (3G) var begränsade. / This paper intends to describe the benefits and disadvantages with 4G technology through a user-perspective where focus lay upon the users of smartphones. The study is made with a qualitative approach and a mixture of a deductive and inductive approach, where the deductive approach is the most prominent. Primary data consist of interviews and surveys. Secondary data derive primarily from academic, evaluated journals. This paper aims to bridge the gap between purely technical data and its actual scope of use, hence creating an increased understanding both among users as well as suppliers. As a result, we identify certain concrete uses of 4G that with previous technologies (3G) were not possible.

No description available.

The mobile jukebox is an idea for a new kind of smartphone application that would allow users to dictate the music playing at various establishments. The mobile nature of the innovation allows for the possibility of a more ubiquitous service. Conducting a quantitative as well a qualitative study, the authors have found significant interest in this innovation service among potential users and potential distributors of the service. Furthermore, it is shown what aspects are important for decision makers to make a decision on whether to integrate the service into the operation of potential distributors of the service.

This paper proposes a device capable of acquiring an electrocardiogram (ECG, EKG) signal to be hosted by a typical Android smartphone. Bluetooth is used as the data connection. Once acquired, the signal is graphed on the display of the smartphone. A basis of physiology behind the ECG is presented. The data acquisition system and the performance of the ECG amplification and supporting circuits are analyzed. / text