Real-time scalable visual analysis on mobile devices

Smart lenses are detachable lenses connected to mobile devices via wireless networks, which are not constrained by the small form factor of mobile devices, and have potential to deliver better photo (video) quality. However, the viewfinder previews of smart lenses on mobile devices are difficult to optimize, due to the strict resource constraints on smart lenses and fluctuating wireless network conditions. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate an open-source smart lens, called Smart Beholder. It achieves three design goals: (i) cost effectiveness, (ii) low interaction latency, and (iii) high preview quality by: (i) selecting an embedded system board that is just powerful enough, (ii) minimizing per-component latency, and (iii) dynamically adapting the video coding parameters to maximizing Quality of Experience (QoE), respectively. Several optimization techniques, such as anti-drifting mechanism for video frames and QoE-driven resolution/frame rate adaptation algorithm, are proposed in this paper. Our measurement study shows that Smart Beholder outperforms Altek Cubic and Sony QX100 in terms of lower bitrate, lower latency, slightly higher frame rate, and better preview quality. We also demonstrate that sys adapts to network dynamics. Smart Beholder has been made public at http://www.smartbeholder.org as an experimental platform for researchers and developers to optimize smart lenses and other embedded real-time video streaming systems.

Wireless communication networks span a wide range of applications such as traditional telephony, internet data access, and cyber-physical infrastructure monitoring. However, the quality of service is still lacking, and problems such as dropped calls, dead spots, and slow network speed are still very common. Those are due to fundamental constraints such as the scarcity of radio-frequency spectrum, signal propagation effects, e.g., channel fading and shadowing, and the small form factor of mobile devices with limited energy capacity and antenna diversity.

Thinner displays are continuously developing for reducing form factor of mobile devices. To manufacture the display be thin, touch screen panel layers are directly patterned on top of the display active layers generating huge capacitive coupling between them. Therefore, the touch screen controller (TSC) have to stimulate over heavily coupled touch sensing channels and endure heavily affected noise from the display operation. To overcome adverse effects of recent incorporated touch-display panel development, this paper presents an analog front-end (AFE) of a TSC with the adiabatic charge recycling driver to effectively generate stimuli. The AFE adopts correlated-noise-sampling-embedded modulation on top of fully differential filtering stages overcoming adverse effects of continually developing ultra-thin mobile displays. Fabricated in a 0.18μm CMOS process, the adiabatically driven AFE provides a signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of 51.5dB with a 4mmφ touch at 120Hz frame rate and achieves a 14.7dB SNR improvement via noise sampling. The AFE consumes 23.7mW and occupies an active area of 9.1mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

Grid computing using wireless networks is receiving increasing attention and is expected to become a critical part of future grid computing. However, the inherent challenges of mobile environments such as mobility management, disconnected operation, device heterogeneity, service discovery, and resource sharing are significant issues in mobile grid computing. To achieve the best performance in a mobile grid computing environment, the mobile devices with the lowest probability of mobility should be selected for use first. We therefore focus on the idle state of mobile devices and use IP-paging scheme to identify the idle mobile devices. For this, we propose a user-defined checkpoint technique for task migration, which is based on the information of when a mobile device will leave the network or stop due to low battery. Our checkpoint technique performs checkpoints by two conditions: when a mobile device leaves its current cell and when it turns off due to low battery capacity.KeywordsMobile GridIP-PagingTask MigrationCheckpoints

Mobile security is more and more important with the fast growth of mobile devices, and people are becoming more dependent on mobile devices in their daily life. Malicious samples in mobile devices are growing in double times each year from 2011 to 2017 in China. ISO/IEC 27000 family of standards helps organizations keep information assets secure, such as financial information, intellectual property, employee details or information entrusted to you by third parties. ISO/IEC 27001 is the best-known standard in the family providing requirements for an information security management system (ISMS). However, ISO/IEC 27001 is not quite adaptable for mobile devices, because these developing mobile information devices lead to new challenges and security risks. This paper analyzes mobile devices security issues, and gives the drawback for 27001 in mobile security. Finally, this paper gives a consideration to these issues under ISO/IEC 27001 information security management system framework.

Due to recent scientific and technological advances in information sys¬tems, it is now possible to perform almost every application on a mobile device. The need to make sense of such devices more intelligent opens an opportunity to design data mining algorithm that are able to autonomous execute in local devices to provide the device with knowledge. The problem behind autonomous mining deals with the proper configuration of the algorithm to produce the most appropriate results. Contextual information together with resource information of the device have a strong impact on both the feasibility of a particu¬lar execution and on the production of the proper patterns. On the other hand, performance of the algorithm expressed in terms of efficacy and efficiency highly depends on the features of the dataset to be analyzed together with values of the parameters of a particular implementation of an algorithm. However, few existing approaches deal with autonomous configuration of data mining algorithms and in any case they do not deal with contextual or resources information. Both issues are of particular significance, in particular for social net¬works application. In fact, the widespread use of social networks and consequently the amount of information shared have made the need of modeling context in social application a priority. Also the resource consumption has a crucial role in such platforms as the users are using social networks mainly on their mobile devices. This PhD thesis addresses the aforementioned open issues, focusing on i) Analyzing the behavior of algorithms, ii) mapping contextual and resources information to find the most appropriate configuration iii) applying the model for the case of a social recommender. Four main contributions are presented: - The EE-Model: is able to predict the behavior of a data mining algorithm in terms of resource consumed and accuracy of the mining model it will obtain. - The SC-Mapper: maps a situation defined by the context and resource state to a data mining configuration. - SOMAR: is a social activity (event and informal ongoings) recommender for mobile devices. - D-SOMAR: is an evolution of SOMAR which incorporates the configurator in order to provide updated recommendations. Finally, the experimental validation of the proposed contributions using synthetic and real datasets allows us to achieve the objectives and answer the research questions proposed for this dissertation.

The explosive growth in the number of mobile devices such as Internet-enabled cellular phones, wireless handheld devices, wireless laptops, and tablet PCs has driven the corresponding growth in applications for mobile computing. These applications usually belong to one of two classes: collaborative applications and individual application. While collaborative applications require several mobile devices to work together and include peer-to-peer computing and grid computing, individual applications are local to the mobile device and its user. In this paper, we present a framework that allows mobile devices to collaboratively work on a computationally-expensive problem. Such a problem is decomposed into smaller tasks and distributed across other mobile devices willing to share their computational power with others. This framework is based on the paradigm of grid computing applied to the domain of wireless mobile devices. This paper presents our current implementation of the framework architecture and simulation of its functionality. Also, we focus on the issues of mobility, QoS and network stability and their effect on the performance of our collaborative problem-solving framework.

Survey on Mobile User's Data Privacy Threats and Defense Mechanisms

In this paper we first show that the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) protocol (used by Wi-Fi Direct, the de facto adhoc communication mechanism for smartphones and mobile devices) is vulnerable to a brute-force or dictionary attack. To defend against these attacks, we propose the idea of using contextual information (i.e., data obtained from mobile device's sensors) to establish a long (128 bits) secure session key between two Wi-Fi Direct enabled devices, instead of using the keypad. Our solution, Session Key Generated from Sensors (SekGens) employs three phases. In the Quantization Phase, the key is iteratively generated based on different sensors' data. In the Reconciliation Phase, the two devices eliminate minor differences in the bits of their keys by using the Cascade reconciliation mechanism. In the Privacy-Amplification-and-Hashing Phase, the two devices omit all bits exposed during the reconciliation phase and apply hashing to the remaining secret bits. SekGens is implemented and evaluated by modifying the Android kernel code responsible for WPS in Google Nexus 5 and Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphones. The results show that SekGens generates keys with low mismatch ratio (less than 3%), at a fast rate (~20 bits/sec), and with high entropy (~92%).

Multi‐standard mobile devices are allowing users to enjoy higher data rates with ubiquitous connectivity. However, the benefits gained from multiple interfaces come at an expense—that being higher energy consumption in an era where mobile devices need to be energy compliant. One promising solution is the usage of short‐range cooperative communication as an overlay for infrastructure‐based networks taking advantage of its context information. However, the node discovery mechanism, which is pivotal to the bearer establishment process, still represents a major burden in terms of the total energy budget. In this paper, we propose a technology agnostic approach towards enhancing the MAC energy ratings by presenting a context‐aware node discovery (CANDi) algorithm, which provides a priori knowledge towards the node discovery mechanism by allowing it to search nodes in the near vicinity at the ‘right time and at the right place’. We describe the different beacons required for establishing the cooperation, as well as the context information required, including battery level, modes, location and so on. CANDi uses the long‐range network (WiMAX and WiFi) to distribute the context information about cooperative clusters (Ultra‐wideband‐based) in the vicinity. The searching nodes can use this context in locating the cooperative clusters/nodes, which facilitates the establishing of short‐range connections. Analytical and simulation results are obtained, and the energy saving gains are further demonstrated in the laboratory using a customised testbed. CANDi saves up to 50% energy during the node discovery process, while the demonstrative testbed shows up to 75% savings in the total energy budget, thus validating the algorithm, as well as providing viable evidence to support the usage of short‐range cooperative communications for energy savings. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Context awareness, user friendliness, and interactivity are very important and powerful concepts in building useful teaching/learning environments for the benefit of mankind. Advancements in technology are enabling us to look at new use cases in the methods of teaching, information sharing, knowledge dissemination, and self-learning. Learning environments are not only for teaching things to people., but also for providing more information to them on any subject that they may require from time to time. User friendliness can be enhanced with clever use of sensors to give hands free interactivity with the devices/gadgets. Context aware applications require sensors to get the context information. Mobile devices like smart phones and tablets today come with a hand full of sensors mounted on them which include one or two cameras, a microphone, a touch screen, an accelerometer to sense motion, and in addition have GPS and digital compass to provide location information to applications requiring these sensory inputs. The computational power packed in the processors used in these devices/gadgets including special support for graphics processing, the near general purpose computer like operating system environments, and the quality of cameras available, are all enabling application developers to map some serious computer vision based applications on today's mobile devices. This reality has encouraged us to get into development of Augmented Reality (AR) based interactive learning environments on mobile devices, leading to our development of a software framework for AR applications development and also development of an AR book and an AR board. AR has been called the eighth mass medium, after print, recordings, cinema, radio, television, Internet and mobile phones. There is ample scope for enhancing the learning/teaching experiences of the users with AR based learning environments. AR makes learning more effective and an enjoyable experience by providing more realistic information with the use of 3D graphics and animated models.

These days, peoples expected to move around carrying their mobile devices, talking to friends, completing their work, accessing emails etc. His/her pictures, work, study, even relationship (friends, and family) all is in the mobile device. Therefore, mobile devices (especially smart phones) become an ideal target for different attacks. Mobile computing also becomes important in enterprises and organizations. Therefore, it is important to illustrate the state of art on vulnerabilities and threats on mobile device. This chapter is addressed to explain mobile computing concept, features, architecture, operating systems, and risks to mobile devices. Mobile operating system structureand characteristicsare demonstrated. The author also illustrates mobile security issues, and type of threats to mobile devices. Finally, features and security models of two popular smartphone operating systems, Android and iOS, are illustrated. It was found that the security models of these two smartphones is immature and do not meet the enterprises security policies.

Many modern mobile devices have a touchscreen and are powered by a rechargeable battery. To extend battery usage time before recharge, harvesting energy from ambient light provides an elegant solution if the photovoltaic (PV) modules can be integrated with mobile devices [1]. However, mobile devices are frequently finger operated and/or in motion, so light-harvesting should consider fast-changing shading and partial shading problems. Previous IC works [2-4] have reported on the implementation of maximum power point tracking (MPPT) for light-harvesting, none of them have concurrently addressed these two problems. Although one of these works [3] considered the mobile device issue, it targets high MPPT steady-state accuracy without considering fast-changing shading problem. Hence, there is still room for improvement with respect to short MPPT transient time to harvest more energy for extending battery usage time.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) is the recently popular game genre that is capable of supporting more than thousands of players in a persistence game world concurrently With the growing of mobile game market size and improvement of wireless technology, a MMOG on mobile device is possible and being concerned. There are many issues that may be encountered when developing a MMOG. Since the mobile game must be created to run on hundreds of device, to deploy and distribute the MMOG on mobile device is harder. Also, the mobile application is easily interrupted by the surrounding environment, such as telecom service or network connectivity. Those make the mobile online game development more challenging. In this paper, we will propose a client framework for MMOG on mobile device that consider both MMOG and mobile games issues. We provide a flexible and easy-to-deploy platform for mobile MMOG.

These days, peoples expected to move around carrying their mobile devices, talking to friends, completing their work, accessing emails etc. His/her pictures, work, study, even relationship (friends, and family) all is in the mobile device. Therefore, mobile devices (especially smart phones) become an ideal target for different attacks. Mobile computing also becomes important in enterprises and organizations. Therefore, it is important to illustrate the state of art on vulnerabilities and threats on mobile device. This chapter is addressed to explain mobile computing concept, features, architecture, operating systems, and risks to mobile devices. Mobile operating system structureand characteristicsare demonstrated. The author also illustrates mobile security issues, and type of threats to mobile devices. Finally, features and security models of two popular smartphone operating systems, Android and iOS, are illustrated. It was found that the security models of these two smartphones is immature and do not meet the enterprises security policies.