Image and Video Retrieval from a User-Centered Mobile Multimedia Perspective

The accelerated development of new technology, particularly on mobile application has increased teacher’s responsibility as a learning facilitator. Since technology is improving, many applications keep on coming into the market to fulfill user demands. Mobile learning application is very useful in enriching the mobile learning experience of children. However, some applications fail to assist and increase children knowledge on the subject they studied. Moreover, some children are not interested in mobile applications due to issues such as poor interfaces. In this paper, some previous studies on quality attributes used to evaluate mobile learning applications were reviewed. A systematic literature review approach was employed to search previous papers and studies on usability quality attributes, particularly for mobile learning applications. The search strategy identified numerous studies on usability for mobile learning applications for children. The result showed that the top four usability quality attributes are efficiency, effectiveness; learnability and user satisfaction. The studies reviewed showed that usability evaluations were conducted during implementation phase only, and evaluation is often built as a description of the case study. This study explored the current literatures on the subject matter and stimulates further studies that will lead to improved usability and design of mobile learning applications for children.

Mobile systems and mobile applications have gained a lot of attention both in research and industry over the last years. The market share of mobile devices is constantly growing. More and more, users expect their mobile devices to provide functionality similar to the one they know from their desktop computers, but also to provide additional, mobile device specific functionality, like location based services. However, software development for mobile devices is still cumbersome and a methodology geared towards supporting the development of such mobile applications is still lacking. While there is broad agreement that developing for mobile devices is more difficult than traditional software engineering, we lack a precise understanding that goes beyond anecdotic evidence of why this is the case and how the situation can be ameliorated. We do not precisely know where and how the development of mobile application differs from “normal” software development and where new methodologies are needed. Aspects that need to be addressed in this context are, among others, the questions of software architectures for mobile applications, approaches to the software design for mobile applications and how the consequences of being mobile, e. g., changing location, changing context, changing connectivity, heterogeneous software and platforms influence the software development process and what design approaches do reflect the specialties of mobile applications and systems appropriately. While this special issue cannot provide a definite or complete answer to these questions, it does provide answers to some important aspects. In the following, we will first try to get a more thorough understanding of some of the main differences between mobile and classical application development and will then discuss how the papers contained in this special issue address these differences.

Diet and nutrition apps are among the most popular health and fitness apps used by an increasing number of mobile device users. Undeniably, health and nutrition are some of the valuable aspects of life. With the introduction of mobile computing, health knowledge became much easier to understand due to its mobility and usability. A vast range of smartphone apps is emerging for tracking health and food. However, the existing mobile applications in Malaysia are lacking some important features. To address this limitation, the present mobile application responds by attempting to design and develop a Malaysian mobile nutrition application known as EatNTrack. EatNTrack is a mobile nutrition application that provides crucial features such as the ability to capture the food especially Malaysian foods, scanning food barcode, set the goal and calories of the day, a reminder for the user to capture the food, monthly progress of user, and integration with a wearable device. The needs of these features will give insight into many aspects of a user's eating habits. The more specific and accurate users with reporting, the more accurate their information will be. The aim of the study was to establish an innovative mobile-based dietary awareness tool that could be used to monitor target users' food intake.
 Keywords: nutrition, mobile application, food calories, track calories, health

In the nowadays enterprise computerized context, there is a trend that shifts the business applications to the new mobile environments. In the light of this information, it is highly important to be knowledgeable about the software development methodologies available in order to make the right choice when it comes to developing a mobile application. The current research aims to presenting the methodological approaches regarding the development cycle of classic enterprise software versus mobile apps. In the first part of the paper a brief literature review regarding the mobile is made, for the purpose of justifying the current research theme. The most consistent part of the article puts face-to-face the classical and the new development methodologies adapted to the requirements of the new mobile environment trends. The paper also presents the challenges and limitations of mobile applications as well as few of the future trends in the researched domain.Keywords: Application 's Lifecycle Models, Agile Models, Mobile Environment, Mobile Apps1 Introduction to Mobile ApplicationsMobile applications, also referred to as mobile apps, are software applications that are usually designed to be ran on smart phones and tablet computers [1], The term apps had become extremely popular and, as a consequence, in 2010 was listed as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Mobile applications are available through application distribution platforms, which are managed by mobile operating system developer.There are several major trends that we believe it contributes to the boost of using the today mobile applications:* the increased availability and options to Internet connection for mobile devices;* the shift to the new mobile environments for the business applications;* cloud application's development;* the newest research findings that identifies new technologies which increased the performance of mobile device while the price remained at the same level, allowed mobile devices to became available for a wider variety of users.Another important aspect, when it comes to mobile application development, is the number of users. Thus, the number of mobile worldwide workers in 2013 is over 1 billion and accounts for about 35% of the worldwide workforce. The structure of the above ratio shows that Asia/Pacific (including Japan) have the largest total number of mobile workers, 785 million, while the second place is taken by Western Europe whose mobile workforce reached 129.5 million in 2013 and accounts for about half of the Western European workforce population. The study [2] also highlights that US has the highest percentage of mobile workers in its workforce, with 75.5% by the end 2013 accounting to 119.7 million mobile workers. A quick glimpse to the future is displayed in the two most recent studies which predict that mobile worker population will reach 1.2 billion by 2014 (a VDC study [3]) and 1.3 billion by 2015 (an IDC study [4]).Every day, hundred thousands of mobile devices are sold and about the same number of applications is downloaded. By 2015, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts [5] that 182.7 billion mobile will be downloaded. That's a 1600 % increase from the 10.7 billion downloaded in 2010. This information highlights the mobile user's appetite for a wide range of software applications.Cloud application development brings innovation [6] to mobile computing as mobile devices use clouds for a wide range of purposes, from data processing and data storage to other intensive data and information transactions. So far, there are few mobile cloud applications (like Google Maps, Gmail for iPhone and Cisco's WebEx on iPad and several others that use Software as a Service model) but the trend is highly increasing.The main purpose of the paper is to present the methodologies for developing classic enterprise application versus mobile applications. …

Understanding the Design of Mobile Social Networking

With the increasing use of mobile applications in Western countries, more emphasis should be taken when designing them for the African community to increase usage. In this paper, a pilot study was conducted with 30 participants to investigate the cultural differences in the design of a mobile health application for the African community residing in Maryland, United States. It highlights the cultural factors that need to be considered when designing a mobile application for the African community. The findings revealed the differences with adoption by gender and age. Differences in age and gender were measured using cultural dimensions. Health management along with cultural markers were examined to better understand factors that affect behavioral changes in the design of a mobile health application.

Advances in wireless communication and mobile computing and networking are providing us with growing business opportunities and demands for multimedia services. Consumer networks, increasingly used for multimedia information and commercial content delivery, are destined to be heterogeneous. Meanwhile, for many multimedia services, security is an important component to restrict unauthorized content access and distribution. This suggests the need for new cryptography system implementations that can operate at different data rates, i.e., be scaled to various multimedia content, different network topology, changing bandwidth, and diverse device capabilities. Encryption is used to ensure confidentiality of messages in communication. Conventional encryption schemes do not offer suitable scalability for this new set of applications. In this paper, we describe scalable encryption, discuss the applications for consumer multimedia access, present scalable encryption schemes that support various kinds of scalability, and present a scalable content access scheme using an algebraic based differentiable-decryption key public key crypto algorithm.

تقييمُ تجربةِ التَّعلُّمِ الإلکترونيّ في ضوءِ مُتطلَّباتِ مُجتَمعِ المعرفةِ من وِجْهَةِ نظرِ أعضاءِ هيئةِ التدريسِ بجامعةِ الأميرةِ نورة بنت عبد الرحمن

Although mobile application ecosystems have experienced tremendous growth in recent years, retrieving content of mobile applications that serves a key to mobile content search engines still faces grand challenges. Compared to web content retrieval, it is much more difficult to capture content in mobile applications due to the diversity of applications and the lack of Uniform Resource Locator indices. In this study, we propose and implement a <underline>u</underline>ser interaction-driven <underline>m</underline>obile <underline>c</underline>ontent <underline>r</underline>etrieval (UMCR) system to address such issues, which is the first mobile content crawler in the current literature. UMCR is a distributed system that contains many measurement nodes, each of which combines the user interaction path traversing (UIPT) and Deep Package Inspection (DPI) together to obtain mobile content. UIPT determines the events of user interactions in various applications to capture the static content such as text and images, in which a traversal depth termination scheme and an optional cut-off component are adopted to balance the content coverage and traversing efficiency. Meanwhile, the analysis based on DPI is responsible for extracting the videos as well as digging the infrastructural information and performance metrics. In addition, a distributed traversal scheduling method is designed for UIPT tasks to improve the throughput and scalability in large-scale content retrieval. Experiments on retrieving content of 64 real mobile applications demonstrate that UMCR can handle diverse mobile applications efficiently. The scheduler can improve throughput by 3 times compared to the legacy arbitrary task assignment strategy.

The user experience (UX) seeks to understand how people experience interaction with technological artifacts, from various points of view. Through an empirical research of qualitative nature, the present paper explores how interaction and interface problems impact the user experience in mobile applications focused on urban mobility. To support the study, we evaluated the user experience offered by two of these applications, whose evaluation process consisted of a combination of methods, aiming to cover several aspects of the user experience. The evaluation results emphasize the need of concerning about aspects that go beyond the quality of use in mobile application design. Based on our findings, we present recommendations for designing urban mobility mobile applications that offer a satisfying and enjoyable user experience.

The study investigated how mobile phones have been used for teaching and learning purposes in higher learning institutions in Tanzania. Specifically the study assessed how mobile phones facilitated the teaching and learning process, identified the mobile phone applications used for teaching and learning, determined the types of learning activities facilitated through mobile phones and assessed the common limitations of m%lea rning in at Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA). The study employed a survey where teaching staff and students from faculties and institutes hosting academic programmes were involved. A total of 30 teaching staff and 40 students were randomly selected and included in the study. In%depth interviews, observations and questionnaire were used for data collection. It was found that majority of the respondents used their mobile phones for teaching and learning process. It was found that most respondents reported to use traditional mobile learning applications including text messages and calls. Few respondents had smart phones with a number of m%learning applications most of them being teaching staff. These were able to create upload, download and share academic resources through their smart phones while others recorded and stored files in their phones. It was also found that among teaching staff many were not aware of the capacity of their mobile phones such that they underutilized them. Costs associated with downloading multimedia content was another constraint which limited some respondents especially students from using phones for learning purposes. More than that, users were forced to use SMART/VISA cards for buying online mobile applications of which most respondents were not aware of.

This paper explores the design of mobile applications for supporting wellness activities. A cross-cultural user study was conducted in India and Finland. 16 participants used a technology probe (a mobile application called Wellness Diary) for the duration of two weeks. The focus of the study was to identify design factors that need to be considered when designing culturally sensitive mobile wellness applications. The findings are based on the subjective user experience reported by the participants, data collected with the technology probe, and ideas and needs of the participants that surfaced during the study. Results show that both cultural and environmental factors affect the needs towards the wellness application and usage of it. Differences were identified, for example, in how users defined wellness, what wellness concerns they had, attitudes towards setting goals, and how built and natural environments affected wellness activities.

Mobile devices are getting increasingly popular all over the world. Mobile users in developing countries however rarely have Internet access which puts them at economic and social disadvantages compared to their counterparts in developed countries. We propose mBridge: A distributed system to disseminate multimedia content to mobile users with intermittent Internet access and opportunistic ad hoc connectivity. By disseminating various multimedia content such as news reports notification messages targeted advertisements movie trailers and TV shows mBridge aims to eliminate the digital divide. We formulate an optimization problem to compute personalized distribution plans for individual mobile users to maximize the overall user experience under various resource constraints. Our formulation jointly considers the characteristics of multimedia content mobile users and intermittent networks. We present an efficient distribution planning algorithm to solve our problem and we develop several online heuristics to adapt to the system and network dynamics. We implement a prototype system and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms by up to 206% 472% and 188% in terms of user experience disk efficiency and energy efficiency respectively. In addition we conduct trace-driven simulations to rigorously evaluate the proposed system in different environments and for large-scale deployments. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm substantially outperforms the closest ones in the literature in all performance measures. We believe that mBridge can allow multimedia content providers to reach out to more mobile users and mobile users to access multimedia content without always-on Internet access.

Design and evaluation of a mobile application for monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease: A day center case study

In this work, we uncover patterns of usage mobile phone applications and information spread in response to perturbations caused by unprecedented events. We focus on categorizing patterns of response in both space and time, tracking their relaxation over time. To this end, we use the NetMob2023 Data Challenge dataset, which provides mobile phone applications traffic volume data for several cities in France at a spatial resolution of 100 m2 and a time resolution of 15 minutes for a time period ranging from March to May 2019. We analyze the spread of information before, during, and after the catastrophic Notre-Dame fire on April 15th and a bombing that took place in the city centre of Lyon on May 24th using volume of data uploaded and downloaded to different mobile applications as a proxy of information transfer dynamics. We identify different clusters of information transfer dynamics in response to the Notre-Dame fire within the city of Paris as well as in other major French cities. We find a clear pattern of significantly above-baseline usage of the application Twitter (currently known as X) in Paris that radially spreads from the area surrounding the Notre-Dame cathedral to the rest of the city. We detect a similar pattern in the city of Lyon in response to the bombing. Further, we present a null model of radial information spread and develop methods of tracking radial patterns over time. Overall, we illustrate novel analytical methods we devise, showing how they enable a new perspective on mobile phone user response to unplanned catastrophic events and giving insight into how information spreads during a catastrophe in both time and space.