A Location-Based Mechanism for Mobile Device Security

Internet access using mobile handheld devices has surpassed that of fixed Internet, but most web pages are designed for desktop browsers. Mobile devices have resource limitations. Consequently, web pages designed for desktop browsing cannot be well displayed on mobile devices. Thus, dynamically transforming web contents designed for desktops into contents which can be displayed in a mobile device is an important task. Various approaches of content adaptation have been proposed to achieve this goal, but no single content adaptation strategy has been found to be effective. On the other hand, e-learning contents have grown manifold over years. In this paper, we provide a framework for an e-learning content adaptation system that can be used with desktops and mobile devices seamlessly. We combine multiple content adaptation strategies to make e-learning contents appropriate for mobile devices. Among the various content adaptation strategies, the segmentation algorithm plays the most important role. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme can be successfully utilized for content adaptation in mobile and handheld devices.

The term Cloud has taken on a significant role in the computer industry and is now recognized as the forerunner of cutting-edge technology that makes possible an enormous variety of services and applications. Cloud computing servers are made up of a large resource pool that combines hardware and software that is readily available and serves users depending on demand, with pay-per-use consumers accessing services. Large amounts of resources that can be consolidated on an active network and cloud servers that can be distant users’ mobile handheld devices are both features of cloud services that may be offered to users. With the use of mobile device resources, this research suggests a novel method of cloud computing that would represent a ground-breaking development for the field. In this situation, virtualization technology may also be leveraged to benefit from the resources of mobile devices. Additionally, mobile devices can function as a backup virtual server for the cloud. Based on the outcomes of the relevant intelligent parameters, a dynamic optimization algorithm may categorize mobile devices that are linked to the cloud and operating as a part of it, and the result log would be stored in the server. Additionally, the log will act as the cloud’s main building block for effectively allocating and scheduling jobs to various types of categorized mobile devices based on the task’s complexity, which results in greater elasticity, flexibility, cost savings, and slick server performance. The potential solution adds a monetary incentive that is advantageous to both the service user and the service provider.

ABSTRACTThis study analyzed driving performance while using different mobile devices in different road configurations and geometries during a critical driving situation. Three different road environments were implemented in a driving simulator: an urban road, a two-lane rural road, and a highway. Thirty drivers with an average age of 26.8 years were asked to answer a phone call while driving, using different mobile devices: hand-held, hands-free, and hands-free voice-activated cellular phone. The effects of using the mobile phones were also compared to the BC (no phone conversation). Driving performance, under car-following conditions, were collected and statistically analyzed when a sudden braking of the leading vehicle occurred. The main results demonstrated that the driver's speed generally reduced during the phone call whereas the reaction time generally increased, especially under certain driving conditions (urban road, along tangent, using hand-held mobile device). This study analyzed the effects of using a mobile phone while driving, highlighted the worst combinations of the variables investigated, and demonstrated that some reductions in driving performance were revealed, especially in the urban environment, even when using mobile equipment permitted by the regulations of several countries.

Energy conservation in battery powered mobile devices that perform wireless multimedia streaming has been a significant research problem since last decade. This is because these mobile devices consume a lot of power while receiving, decoding and ultimately, presenting the multimedia content. What makes things worse is the fact that battery technologies have not evolved enough to keep up with the rapid advancement of mobile devices. This survey examines solutions that have been proposed during the last few years, to improve the energy efficiency of wireless multimedia streaming in mobile hand-held devices. We categorize the research work according to different layers of the Internet protocol stack they utilize. Then, we again regroup these studies based on different traffic scheduling and multimedia content adaptation mechanisms. The traffic scheduling category contains those solutions that optimize the wireless receiving energy without changing the actual multimedia content. The second category on the other hand, specifically modifies the content, in order to reduce the energy consumed by the wireless receiver and to decode and view the content. We compare them and provide evidence of the fact that some of these tactics already exist in modern smaprtphones and provide energy savings with real measurements. In addition, we discuss some relevant literature on the complementary problem of energy-aware multimedia delivery from mobile devices and contrast with our target approaches for multimedia transmission to mobile devices.

The ability to view crowded public spaces in real-time has a variety of applications including virtual tourism, surveillance and sports. In addition, given the prevalence of handheld wireless devices, visualization on mobile handheld devices is beneficial for a large proportion of users. In this work we summarize our research on crowd visualization on wireless and handheld devices combining compression, 3D modeling and interactive visualization. We also synthesize crowds to validate our preliminary implementations. In order to achieve very high compression rates we use a novel perceptually adaptive approach for motion capture data compression. Our visualization interface can be used for simulation of crowds, and evaluating the design and capacity tolerances to crowds for public transit systems.

Due to advances in techniques for digital ecosystems and cyber engineering, users can now submit queries to search for inclusive information from different Web objects using mobile handheld devices such as smartphones in many real-life situations. As these mobile devices are not necessarily connected to the Internet all the time, users usually want to be able to get information such as e-mail, news, weather, and Web feed as soon as their mobile devices are connected to the Internet. However, these mobile devices have relatively limited resources. In this paper, we focus on mobile web navigation. Specifically, we use rooted directed trees, which enable users to access valuable information from the highly ranked and relevant Web sites, for answering user-inclusive queries.

In the current age of ubiquitous computing age that uses high bandwidth network, wearable and hand-held mobile devices with small cameras and wireless communication will be widespread in the near future. Thus, computer vision and image processing for mobile devices have recently attracted a lot of attention. Especially, many approaches to detect image texts containing useful information for automatic annotation, indexing, and structuring of image are important for a prerequisite stage of recognition in dictionary application using mobile devices equipped with a camera. To detect image texts on the mobile devices that have limited computational resources, recent works are based on two methodologies; the image texts are detected not by automatically but by manually using stylus pen to reduce the computational resources, and the server is used to detect image texts requiring many floating-computations. The main disadvantage of the manual method is that users directly select tentative text regions, and recall and precision rates are determined by the selected regions. The second method to automatically detect the image texts is difficult to perform it in real-time, due to transmission time between the mobile device and the server. Accordingly, this paper proposes a real-time automatic word detection system without support of the server. To minimize the computational time, one word in the central region of the image is considered as a target of the system. The word region is tentatively extracted by using edge density and window transition, and the tentatively extracted region is then verified by measuring uniform distribution among sub-windows of the extracted region. In the experiments, the proposed method showed high precision rates for one word in the central region of the image, and showed fast computational time on the mobile devices.

There is no doubt that the use of wireless andmobile networks and devices is growing. From the1990s onwards, we have been witnessing a great shift in methods of doing business with the emergence of the electronic commerce (e-commerce). Academics, businesses, and even individuals have been focusing on this new way of conducting business online. Advanced and mature wireless and mobile technologies facilitate e-commerce conducted from a wired network to a wireless network. Mobile commerce (m-commerce) can be viewed as a subset of e-commerce and refers to bany transaction with monetary value that is conducted via a mobile network .When users conduct e-commerce such as e-banking or purchase products, they do not need to use a personal computer system. Indeed, they can simply use some mobile handheld devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and mobile phones to conduct various e-commerce activities. In the past, these mobile devices or technologies were regarded as a kind of luxury for individuals. However, this situation has changed. The market for mobile technologies has seen significant growth in the past few years. This is creating a new opportunity for the growth of m-commerce. According to a study conducted by Datamonitor, global m-commerc revenues will amount to $131.7 billion by 2017.

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical design methodology for grid access from handheld devices. After determining all user interactions required and technologies available, they are arranged in layers. All functions in a layer are also supported by all underlying layers. By doing so, the designer is less conditioned by the constraints of a specific, out-of-context platform. Additionally, in a stratified modular design, many software components can be re-used. We present a prototype to access Condor from two neighbor layers: PDAs and cell phones.

We discuss the benefits of using a mobile device to expand and improve the interactions on a large touch-sensitive surface. The mobile device's denser arrangement of pixels and touch-sensor elements, and its rich set of mechanical on-board input controls, can be leveraged for increased expressiveness, visual feedback and more precise direct-manipulation. We also show how these devices can support unique input from multiple simultaneous users in collaborative scenarios. Handheld mobile devices and large interactive surfaces can be mutually beneficial in numerous ways, while their complementary nature allows them to preserve the behavior of the original user interface.

Currently, mobile handheld device are being used increasingly for web access. This leads to the issue relating to the ease of use for users, which refers to not user-friendly web design, unorganized content and difficulty of information navigation. Based on literature analysis, design of physical features and functions for mobile devices are unique, as it should emphasize mobility, personality and flexibility features, apart from providing the added values, such as accessibility at anytime and anywhere access. However as most web applications are designed specifically for desktop environments, it is discovered that most web applications design are inappropriate for mobile devices. In other words, web sites design for desktop is unsuitable to be adopted for the mobile devices. Literature had stated that designing mobile web application approach differs from development ordinary web for desktop computer. Adapting the original web content dynamically to deal with the constraints of mobile handheld devices (the screen size and limited system resources and variation of user preferences) becomes very important. Combination of User Centred Design (UCD) and Service Science (SS) approach expected to enhance quality of the mobile web that can meet user satisfaction. As such the purpose of this study is to identify the design of mobile web content that is suitable for users' in which it meet users' values and requirement. The work conducted uses a co-creation approach in which co-creation values are obtained through a series of process. Co-creation value is essential as it is the missing part that is not being incorporated during the design process. As a result a guideline on web mobile design application based on co-creation values is established. The investigations presented in this paper highlight some ways in development of mobile web applications by adopting co-creation value with customer to make it more accessible to mobile devices. A case study conducted at Malaysian Agricultural Research And Development Institute (MARDI) as its web mobile applications is still at its initial. A prototype system based on the proposed guideline is provided as a proof of concept and shows the difference required in web applications for mobile design where values are incorporated.

Mobile and handheld devices are becoming an integral part of people’s work, life and entertainment. These lightweight pocket-sized devices offer great mobility, acceptable computation power and friendly user interfaces. As people are making business transactions and managing their online bank accounts via handheld devices, they are concerned with the security level that mobile devices and systems provide. In this chapter we will discuss whether these devices, equipped with very limited computation power compared to full-sized computers, can make equivalent security services available to users. We focus on the security designs and technologies of hardware, operating systems and applications for mobile and handheld devices.

In aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) industry, tracking and tracing the aircraft components using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can tremendously improve operational efficiency, safety, security, and customer satisfaction. MRO works are performed at both process and operation levels. Due to the mobility requirement, the operation-level track and trace is usually implemented with mobile handheld device (MHD). To cope with the inherent constraints of mobile device including unreliability network connectivity and limited processing power, a MHD system design robust over network failure is proposed. To facilitate the information exchange and data synchronization between MHD and backend systems, an Integrated RFID Information Management and Synchronization (IRIMS) system is proposed. A prototype for the proposed MHD and IRIMS systems is implemented and the testing results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed designs.

What people look at during a visual task reflects an interplay between ocular motor functions and cognitive processes. In this paper, we study the links between eye gaze and cognitive states to investigate whether eye gaze reveal information about an individual’s knowledgeability. We focus on a mobile learning scenario where a user and a virtual agent play a quiz game using a hand-held mobile device. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to predict user’s knowledgeability from eye gaze using a noninvasive eye tracking method on mobile devices: we perform gaze estimation using front-facing camera of mobile devices in contrast to using specialised eye tracking devices. First, we define a set of eye movement features that are discriminative for inferring user’s knowledgeability. Next, we train a model to predict users’ knowledgeability in the course of responding to a question. We obtain a classification performance of 59.1% achieving human performance, using eye movement features only, which has implications for (1) adapting behaviours of the virtual agent to user’s needs (e.g., virtual agent can give hints); (2) personalising quiz questions to the user’s perceived knowledgeability.

The pervasiveness of mobile handheld devices and advancement in real-time continuous speech recognition technology has opened up a wide range of research opportunities in human-computer interaction for those devices. On the one hand, there has been an increasing amount of research on developing user-friendly speech recognition solutions and applications for mobile handheld devices. On the other hand, there are many distinct challenges in mobile speech recognition. Aiming to gain a good understanding of this emerging yet challenging area and provide a research map, this paper presents a state-of-the-art overview of this field. We will discuss three main architectures of mobile speech recognition systems, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, introduce some major research issues in the field, and highlight a number of major applications of speech recognition on handheld devices. The authors will also shed some light into important future research issues as a road map for researchers and practitioners.