Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Privacy-Preserving Arbitrary Geometric Range Query In Mobile Internet Of Vehicles, Yinbin Miao, Lin Song, Xinghua Li, Hongwei Li, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The mobile Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) has great potential for intelligent transportation, and creates spatial data query demands to realize the value of data. Outsourcing spatial data to a cloud server eliminates the need for local computation and storage, but it leads to data security and privacy threats caused by untrusted third-parties. Existing privacy-preserving spatial range query solutions based on Homomorphic Encryption (HE) have been developed to increase security. However, in the single server model, the private key is held by the query user, which incurs high computation and communication burdens on query users due to multiple rounds of interactions. …

Interpretable Learning In Multivariate Big Data Analysis For Network Monitoring, José Camacho, Rasmus Bro, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

There is an increasing interest in the development of new data-driven models useful to assess the performance of communication networks. For many applications, like network monitoring and troubleshooting, a data model is of little use if it cannot be interpreted by a human operator. In this paper, we present an extension of the Multivariate Big Data Analysis (MBDA) methodology, a recently proposed interpretable data analysis tool. In this extension, we propose a solution to the automatic derivation of features, a cornerstone step for the application of MBDA when the amount of data is massive. The resulting network monitoring approach allows …

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An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Deep Parameters On Mobile App Energy Usage, Qiang Xu, James C. Davis, Y Charlie Hu, Abhilash Jindal

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Improving software performance through configuration parameter tuning is a common activity during software maintenance. Beyond traditional performance metrics like latency, mobile app developers are interested in reducing app energy usage. Some mobile apps have centralized locations for parameter tuning, similar to databases and operating systems, but it is common for mobile apps to have hundreds of parameters scattered around the source code. The correlation between these "deep" parameters and app energy usage is unclear. Researchers have studied the energy effects of deep parameters in specific modules, but we lack a systematic understanding of the energy impact of mobile deep parameters. …

Annapurna: An Automated Smartwatch-Based Eating Detection And Food Journaling System, Sougata Sen, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Maintaining a food journal can allow an individual to monitor eating habits, including unhealthy eating sessions, food items causing severe reactions, or portion size related information. However, manually maintaining a food journal can be burdensome. In this paper, we explore the vision of a pervasive, automated, completely unobtrusive, food journaling system using a commodity smartwatch. We present a prototype system — Annapurna— which is composed of three key components: (a) a smartwatch-based gesture recognizer that can robustly identify eating-specific gestures occurring anywhere, (b) a smartwatch-based image captor that obtains a small set of relevant images (containing views of the food …

Coding Overhead Of Mobile Apps, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A mobile app runs on small devices such as smartphones and tablets. Perhaps, because of this, there is a common misconception that writing a mobile app is simpler than a desktop application. In this paper, we show that this is indeed a misconception, and it's the other way around. We perform a small experiment to measure the source code sizes of a desktop application and an equivalent mobile app written in the same language. We found that the mobile version is 19% bigger than the desktop version in terms of the source lines of code, and the mobile code is …

Real-Time Indoor Assistive Localization With Mobile Omnidirectional Vision And Cloud Gpu Acceleration, Feng Hu, Zhigang Zhu, Jeury Mejia, Hao Tang

Publications and Research

In this paper we propose a real-time assistive localization approach to help blind and visually impaired people in navigating an indoor environment. The system consists of a mobile vision front end with a portable panoramic lens mounted on a smart phone, and a remote image feature-based database of the scene on a GPU-enabled server. Compact and elective omnidirectional image features are extracted and represented in the smart phone front end, and then transmitted to the server in the cloud. These features of a short video clip are used to search the database of the indoor environment via image-based indexing to …

Toward Accurate Network Delay Measurement On Android Phones, Weichao Li, Daoyuan Wu, Rocky K. C. Chang, Ricky K. P. Mok

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Measuring and understanding the performance of mobile networks is becoming very important for end users and operators. Despite the availability of many measurement apps, their measurement accuracy has not received sufficient scrutiny. In this paper, we appraise the accuracy of smartphone-based network performance measurement using the Android platform and the network round-trip time (RTT) as the metric. We show that two of the most popular measurement apps-Ookla Speedtest and MobiPerf-have their RTT measurements inflated. We build three test apps that cover three common measurement methods and evaluate them in a testbed. We overcome the main challenge of obtaining a complete …

Where Am I? Characterizing And Improving The Localization Performance Of Off-The-Shelf Mobile Devices Through Cooperation, Huiguang Liang, Hyong S. Kim, Hwee-Pink Tan, Wai-Leong Yeow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We are increasingly reliant on cellular data services for many types of day-to-day activities, from hailing a cab, to searching for nearby restaurants. Geo-location has become a ubiquitous feature that underpins the functionality of such applications. Network operators can also benefit from accurate mobile terminal localization in order to quickly detect and identify location-related network performance issues, such as coverage holes and congestion, based on mobile measurements. Current implementations of mobile localization on the wildly-popular Android platform depend on either the Global Positioning System (GPS), Android's Network Location Provider (NLP), or a combination of both. In this paper, we extensively …

Mobile Devices At The Cinema Theatre, Edward R. Sykes, Dilip Muthukrishnan, Yousif Al-Yousifi, Darren Spriet, Krzysztof Pietroszek

Faculty Publications and Scholarship

The pre-show experience is a significant part of the movie industry. Moviegoers, on average arrive 24 min before when the previews start. Previews have been a part of the movie experience for more than a hundred years and are a culturally significant aspect of the whole experience. Over the last decade, the premovie in-theatre experience has grown to a $600 million industry. This growth continues to accelerate. Since 2012, this industry has increased by 150%. Consequently, there is an industry-wide demand for innovation in the pre-movie area. In this paper, we describe Paths, an innovative multiplayer real-time socially engaging game …

Smart Sensing And Mobile Computing, Guihai Chen, Dakshnamoorthy Manivannan, Chen Qian, Fangming Liu, Jinsong Han

Computer Science Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Location Privacy For Mobile Crowd Sensing Through Population Mapping, Minho Shin, Cory Cornelius, Apu Kapadia, Nikos Triandopoulos, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Opportunistic sensing allows applications to “task” mobile devices to measure context in a target region. For example, one could leverage sensor-equipped vehicles to measure traffic or pollution levels on a particular street or users' mobile phones to locate (Bluetooth-enabled) objects in their vicinity. In most proposed applications, context reports include the time and location of the event, putting the privacy of users at increased risk: even if identifying information has been removed from a report, the accompanying time and location can reveal sufficient information to de-anonymize the user whose device sent the report. We propose and evaluate a novel spatiotemporal …

Tools For Discovering And Archiving The Mobile Web, Frank Mccown Ph.D., Monica Yarbrough, Keith Enlow

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Many websites are adapting their content for users who are accessing the Web using smartphones and tablets. The growth of this Mobile Web has required web archivists to change their practices in order to collect this ephemeral web content. We have created a tool called MobileFinder which can be used to automatically detect mobile pages when given the URL of a desktop web page. We used this tool in an experiment to gauge what techniques popular websites are currently using to expose mobile content, and we incorporated the tool into Heritrix to demonstrate its usefulness to the web archiving community.

A Generalized Service Replication Process In Distributed Environments, Hany F. Elyamany, Marwa F. Mohamed, Katarina Grolinger, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Replication is one of the main techniques aiming to improve Web services’ (WS) quality of service (QoS) in distributed environments, including clouds and mobile devices. Service replication is a way of improving WS performance and availability by creating several copies or replicas of Web services which work in parallel or sequentially under defined circumstances. In this paper, a generalized replication process for distributed environments is discussed based on established replication studies. The generalized replication process consists of three main steps: sensing the environment characteristics, determining the replication strategy, and implementing the selected replication strategy. To demonstrate application of the generalized …

Context-Aware Mobile Apps Using Ibeacons: Towards Smarter Interactions, Edward R. Sykes, Stephen Pentland, Saverio Nardi

Faculty Publications and Scholarship

In this paper we describe four mobile apps for iOS devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy iBeacons to provide contextual relevance and personalized experiences for the user. The applications span a number of vertical markets including asset tracking, food transportation logistics and health care. We developed these apps in collaboration with an industry partner located in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. In this paper we present the relevant background of work in this area, the architectural framework that we designed and developed to support these context-aware apps, the apps themselves, and report on the findings of real use test case scenarios.

Singapore Management University Establishes A New Research Centre On Secure Mobile Computing Technologies And Solutions, Singapore Management University

SMU Press Releases

The Singapore Management University (SMU) has announced today the establishment of a new centre of research excellence that focuses on mobile computing security. Funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), the Secure Mobile Centre is developing efficient and scalable technologies and solutions that strengthen the security of mobile computing systems, applications and services. The Secure Mobile Centre is led by a team of five faculty members from SMU’s School of Information Systems who specialise in information security and trust: Professor Robert DENG (Centre Director), Professor PANG Hwee Hwa, Associate Professor LI Yingjiu, Associate Professor DING Xuhua and Assistant Professor Debin …

Pointing Devices For Wearable Computers, Saverio Perugini, Andres A. Calvo

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present a survey of pointing devices for wearable computers, which are body-mounted devices that users can access at any time. Since traditional pointing devices (i.e., mouse, touchpad, and trackpoint) were designed to be used on a steady and flat surface, they are inappropriate for wearable computers. Just as the advent of laptops resulted in the development of the touchpad and trackpoint, the emergence of wearable computers is leading to the development of pointing devices designed for them. However, unlike laptops, since wearable computers are operated from different body positions under different environmental conditions for different uses, researchers have developed …

Barometric Phone Sensors: More Hype Than Hope!, Kartik Muralidharan, Azeem Javed Khan, Archan Misra, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Sharad Agarwal

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The inclusion of the barometer sensor in smartphones signaled an opportunity for aiding indoor localization efforts. In this paper, we therefore investigate a possible use of the barometer sensor for detecting vertically oriented activities. We start by showing the accuracies of various commodity measurement devices and the challenges they bring forth. We then show how to use the barometer values to build a predictor that can detect floor changes and the mode (elevator, escalator, or stairs) used to change floors with nearly 100% accuracy. We validate these properties with data collected using 3 different measurement devices from 7 different buildings. …

Livelabs: Building An In-Situ Real-Time Mobile Experimentation Testbed, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Archan Misra, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present LiveLabs, a mobile experimentation testbed that is currently deployed across our university campus with further deployments at a large shopping mall, a commercial airport, and a resort island soon to follow. The key goal of LiveLabs is to allow in-situ real-time experimentation of mobile applications and services that require context-specific triggers with real participants on their actual smart phones. We describe how LiveLabs works, and then explain the novel R&D required to realise it. We end with a descriptionof the current LiveLabs status (> 700 active participants to date) as well as present some key lessons learned.

A Robust Smart Card-Based Anonymous User Authentication Protocol For Wireless Communications, Fengton Wen, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anonymous user authentication is an important but challenging task for wireless communications. In a recent paper, Das proposed a smart cardï based anonymous user authentication protocol for wireless communications. The scheme can protect user privacy and is believed to be secure against a range of network attacks even if the secret information stored in the smart card is compromised. In this paper, we reanalyze the security of Das' scheme, and show that the scheme is in fact insecure against impersonation attacks. We then propose a new smart cardï based anonymous user authentication protocol for wireless communications. Compared with the existing …

Spring­11: Pdc In Cs1/2 And A Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Mobile/Cloud Intermediate Software Design Course, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, Chandra N. Sekharan, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Recent changes in the environment of Loyola University Chicago’s Department of Computer Science include a better differentiation of our four undergraduate majors, growing interest in computing among science majors, and an increased demand for graduates with mobile and cloud skills. In our continued effort to incorporate parallel and distributed computing topics into the undergraduate curriculum, we are focusing on these three existing courses:

CS1: In response to a request from the physics department, we started to offer a CS1 section aimed at majors in physics and other hard sciences this spring semester. This section includes some material on numerical methods …

Privacy In Mobile Technology For Personal Healthcare, Sasikanth Avancha, Amit Baxi, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Information technology can improve the quality, efficiency, and cost of healthcare. In this survey, we examine the privacy requirements of \emphmobile\/ computing technologies that have the potential to transform healthcare. Such \emphmHealth\/ technology enables physicians to remotely monitor patients' health, and enables individuals to manage their own health more easily. Despite these advantages, privacy is essential for any personal monitoring technology. Through an extensive survey of the literature, we develop a conceptual privacy framework for mHealth, itemize the privacy properties needed in mHealth systems, and discuss the technologies that could support privacy-sensitive mHealth systems. We end with a list of …

An Amulet For Trustworthy Wearable Mhealth, Jacob Sorber, Minho Shin, Ronald Peterson, Cory Cornelius, Shrirang Mare, Aarathi Prasad, Zachary Marois, Emma N. Smithayer, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile technology has significant potential to help revolutionize personal wellness and the delivery of healthcare. Mobile phones, wearable sensors, and home-based tele-medicine devices can help caregivers and individuals themselves better monitor and manage their health. While the potential benefits of this “mHealth” technology include better health, more effective healthcare, and reduced cost, this technology also poses significant security and privacy challenges. In this paper we propose \emphAmulet, an mHealth architecture that provides strong security and privacy guarantees while remaining easy to use, and outline the research and engineering challenges required to realize the Amulet vision.

Anonysense: A System For Anonymous Opportunistic Sensing, Minho Shin, Cory Cornelius, Dan Peebles, Apu Kapadia, David Kotz, Nikos Triandopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

We describe AnonySense, a privacy-aware system for realizing pervasive applications based on collaborative, opportunistic sensing by personal mobile devices. AnonySense allows applications to submit sensing \emphtasks\/ to be distributed across participating mobile devices, later receiving verified, yet anonymized, sensor data \emphreports\/ back from the field, thus providing the first secure implementation of this participatory sensing model. We describe our security goals, threat model, and the architecture and protocols of AnonySense. We also describe how AnonySense can support extended security features that can be useful for different applications. We evaluate the security and feasibility of AnonySense through security analysis and prototype …

Is Bluetooth The Right Technology For Mhealth?, Shrirang Mare, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many people believe mobile healthcare (mHealth) would help alleviate the rising cost of healthcare and improve the quality of service. Bluetooth, which is the most popular wireless technology for personal medical devices, is used for most of the mHealth sensing applications. In this paper we raise the question – Is Bluetooth the right technology for mHealth? To instigate the discussion we discuss some shortcomings of Bluetooth and also point out an alternative solution.

On Usable Authentication For Wireless Body Area Networks, Cory Cornelius, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

We examine a specific security problem in wireless body area networks (WBANs), what we call the ıt one body authentication problem. That is, how can we ensure that the wireless sensors in a WBAN are collecting data about one individual and not several individuals. We explore existing solutions to this problem and provide some analysis why these solutions are inadequate. Finally, we provide some direction towards a promising solution to the problem and how it can be used to create a usably secure WBAN.

A Privacy Framework For Mobile Health And Home-Care Systems, David Kotz, Sasikanth Avancha, Amit Baxi

Dartmouth Scholarship

In this paper, we consider the challenge of preserving patient privacy in the context of mobile healthcare and home-care systems, that is, the use of mobile computing and communications technologies in the delivery of healthcare or the provision of at-home medical care and assisted living. This paper makes three primary contributions. First, we compare existing privacy frameworks, identifying key differences and shortcomings. Second, we identify a privacy framework for mobile healthcare and home-care systems. Third, we extract a set of privacy properties intended for use by those who design systems and applications for mobile healthcare and home-care systems, linking them …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

Activity-Aware Ecg-Based Patient Authentication For Remote Health Monitoring, Janani Sriram, Minho Shin, Tanzeem Choudhury, David Kotz

Dartmouth Scholarship

Mobile medical sensors promise to provide an efficient, accurate, and economic way to monitor patients' health outside the hospital. Patient authentication is a necessary security requirement in remote health monitoring scenarios. The monitoring system needs to make sure that the data is coming from the right person before any medical or financial decisions are made based on the data. Credential-based authentication methods (e.g., passwords, certificates) are not well-suited for remote healthcare as patients could hand over credentials to someone else. Furthermore, one-time authentication using credentials or trait-based biometrics (e.g., face, fingerprints, iris) do not cover the entire monitoring period and …

A Distributed Spatial Index For Error-Prone Wireless Data Broadcast, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Ken C. K. Lee, Dik Lun Lee, Min Shao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information is valuable to users when it is available not only at the right time but also at the right place. To support efficient location-based data access in wireless data broadcast systems, a distributed spatial index (called DSI) is presented in this paper. DSI is highly efficient because it has a linear yet fully distributed structure that naturally shares links in different search paths. DSI is very resilient to the error-prone wireless communication environment because interrupted search operations based on DSI can be resumed easily. It supports search algorithms for classical location-based queries such as window queries and kNN queries …

Consistency Management Strategies For Data Replication In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Takahiro Hara, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In a mobile ad hoc network, data replication drastically improves data availability. However, since mobile hosts' mobility causes frequent network partitioning, consistency management of data operations on replicas becomes a crucial issue. In such an environment, the global consistency of data operations on replicas is not desirable by many applications. Thus, new consistency maintenance based on local conditions such as location and time need to be investigated. This paper attempts to classify different consistency levels according to requirements from applications and provides protocols to realize them. We report simulation results to investigate the characteristics of these consistency protocols in a …