A location-based personal task reminder for mobile users

Personal task reminders have been indispensable for modern people, in order to remind them of their tasks at specific circumstances. Traditional paper-based reminders are still useful, but they cannot be organized efficiently. Electronic reminders based on the calendar in cell phones are more efficient and gaining popularity, but such reminders are mostly triggered by time. In many situations, tasks are only meaningful to be performed at a specific location, so it would be useful if reminders for those tasks can be triggered only when the person to be reminded is physically near or located at that location. Therefore, in this research, we develop a location-based personal task reminder for Android-based smartphones and tablets. To distinguish our work from existing ones that rely solely on the GPS technology, we take advantage of the ubiquity of IEEE 802.11 WLAN infrastructure to compliment the “blind spots” of GPS location sensing. Combining the two technologies makes it possible for the personal task reminder to be effective in both indoor and outdoor environments. We also propose two operating models for the personal task reminder to boost the usability of the application. Furthermore, as long as the WLAN infrastructure is available, our work as a foundation of location-based services can easily be extended to be used in many other scenarios, such as guiding in public transportation systems or tourist attractions, location-based learning, and even caring of the Dementia residents.     

Natural language interface for information management on mobile devices

A natural language interface (NLI) enables the ease-of-use of information systems in performing sophisticated human - computer interaction. To address the challenges of mobile devices to user interaction in information management, we propose an NLI as a promising solution. In this paper, we review state-of-the-art NLI technologies and analyse user requirements for managing notable information on mobile devices. To minimize any technical difficulties arising from developing and improving the usability of NLI systems we develop general principles for NLI design, which fills in a gap in the literature. In order to satisfy user requirements for information management on mobile devices, we innovatively design NLI-enabled information management architecture. It is shown from two usage scenarios that the architecture could lead to reduced effort in user navigation and improved efficiency and effectiveness of managing information on mobile devices. We conclude the article with the implications of this study and suggestions for future direction.     

A location-based mobile health care facility search system for senior citizens

Recently, an elderly population who needs health care or nursing service has been growing rapidly in the Republic of Korea due to a sharp increase in the number of senior citizens. But it is not easy for them to find an accessible and adequate proper health care center that can attend to their needs. For instance, an elder with a cardiovascular disorder should be close to a medical clinic that can attend to his/her illness. This also applies to other diseases as the mobility of seniors is limited. Thus, the program proposed facility in this study allows senior citizens to locate an appropriate medical facility by using smartphone’s GPS-based location information together with a mobile push system. Also, this O2O program monitors the user with the Bluetooth beacons. The development program autonomously estimates the current coordinates of user with a GPS function or a network information system to locate the nearest medical centers or clinics from the database where the information regarding the location of medical facilities and user, along with their specialties, has been stored in advance. The equation of straight line and the user coordinates are used to find suitable prospect medical facilities. The program also offers a user monitoring service (senior citizen) so that it will be able to provide a variety of high-quality services by establishing a technical alliance with medical centers.

     

Spatial cloaking for anonymous location-based services in mobile peer-to-peer environments

This paper tackles a privacy breach in current location-based services (LBS) where mobile users have to report their exact location information to an LBS provider in order to obtain their desired services. For example, a user who wants to issue a query asking about her nearest gas station has to report her exact location to an LBS provider. However, many recent research efforts have indicated that revealing private location information to potentially untrusted LBS providers may lead to major privacy breaches. To preserve user location privacy, spatial cloaking is the most commonly used privacy-enhancing technique in LBS. The basic idea of the spatial cloaking technique is to blur a user’s exact location into a cloaked area that satisfies the user specified privacy requirements. Unfortunately, existing spatial cloaking algorithms designed for LBS rely on fixed communication infrastructure, e.g., base stations, and centralized/distributed servers. Thus, these algorithms cannot be applied to a mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) environment where mobile users can only communicate with other peers through P2P multi-hop routing without any support of fixed communication infrastructure or servers. In this paper, we propose a spatial cloaking algorithm for mobile P2P environments. As mobile P2P environments have many unique limitations, e.g., user mobility, limited transmission range, multi-hop communication, scarce communication resources, and network partitions, we propose three key features to enhance our algorithm: (1) An information sharing scheme enables mobile users to share their gathered peer location information to reduce communication overhead; (2) A historical location scheme allows mobile users to utilize stale peer location information to overcome the network partition problem; and (3) A cloaked area adjustment scheme guarantees that our spatial cloaking algorithm is free from a “center-of-cloaked-area” privacy attack. Experimental results show that our P2P spatial cloaking algorithm is scalable while guaranteeing the user’s location privacy protection.     

移动终端位置服务系统的实现

分析了移动终端位置服务的必要性和可行性,阐述了移动终端服务系统的基本内容,设计出移动终端位置服务系统的结构框架,给出了移动终端位置服务系统中客户端、服务器端及第三方内容和地理移动服务3个关键部分的实现模式,最后展望了移动终端位置服务系统的应用前景.     

A secure energy-efficient m-banking application for mobile devices

Mobile banking is one of the emerging services in telecommunications due to the explosive increase in the number of mobile customers around the world. Solutions for mobile banking are varied, ranging from the use of Wireless Transport Layer Security, Security Socket Layer, or application-layer based options. Whereas security at the transport layer is a good choice for e-banking, using it in a mobile device presents several disadvantages such as high energy consumption. In this work, we present a secure energy-efficient m-banking solution for mobile devices. We propose an application-layer protocol whose message formats and message exchanges are designed to reduce time processing, bandwidth use, and energy consumption. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that our secure solution reduces power and energy consumption in more than 30% compared to a secure web-access from the mobile device.     

A query-oriented XML text summarization for mobile devices

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, flexible text format derived from SGML, which is originally designed to support large-scale electronic publishing. Nowadays XML plays a fundamental role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web. As XML allows designers to create their own customized tags, enables the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications, devices and organizations, lots of works in soft computing employ XML to take control and responsibility for the information, such as fuzzy markup language, and accordingly there are lots of XML-based data or documents. However, most of mobile and interactive ubiquitous multimedia devices have restricted hardware such as CPU, memory, and display screen. So, it is essential to compress an XML document/element collection to a brief summary before it is delivered to the user according to his/her information need. Query-oriented XML text summarization aims to provide users a brief and readable substitution of the original retrieved documents/elements according to the user’s query, which can relieve users’ reading burden effectively. We propose a query-oriented XML summarization system QXMLSum, which extracts sentences and combines them as a summary based on three kinds of features: user’s queries, the content of XML documents/elements, and the structure of XML documents/elements. Experiments on the IEEE-CS datasets used in Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval show that the query-oriented XML summary generated by QXMLSum is competitive.     

Long-term location privacy protection for location-based services in mobile cloud computing

The popularity of mobile devices, especially intelligent mobile phones, significantly prompt various location-based services (LBSs) in cloud systems. These services not only greatly facilitate people’s daily lives, but also cause serious threats that users’ location information may be misused or leaked by service providers. The dummy-based privacy protection techniques have significant advantages over others because they neither rely on trusted servers nor need adequate number of trustworthy peers. Existing dummy-based location privacy protection schemes, however, cannot yet provide long-term privacy protection. In this paper, we propose four principles for the dummy-based long-term location privacy protection (LT-LPP). Based on the principles, we propose a set of long-term consistent dummy generation algorithms for the LT-LPP. Our approach is built on soft computing techniques and can balance the preferred privacy protection and computing cost. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach is effective to both long-term privacy protection and fake path generation for LBSs in mobile clouds.     

Speech recognition for mobile devices

This article presents an overview of different approaches for providing automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to mobile users. Three principal system architectures with respect to the employment of a wireless communication link are analyzed: Embedded Speech Recognition Systems, Network Speech Recognition (NSR) and Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR). An overview of the solutions having been standardized so far as well as a critical analysis of the latest developments in the field of speech recognition in mobile environments is given. Open issues, pros and cons of the different methodologies and techniques are highlighted. Special emphasis is placed on the constraints and limitations ASR applications are confronted with under different architectures.     

A study of presentations of mobile web banners for location-based information and entertainment information websites

Compared to the Internet, mobile telecommunication has the characteristics of being anywhere, anytime and always online. As the growth of the Internet advertisements market slows down, there is a substantial increase in mobile advertisements. This research investigates the effectiveness of the presentation (static text and graphics, static text and graphics with audio, and animation) of mobile advertisements on the recognition of advertisements. The two types of websites for mobile advertisements - entertainment information and location-based information - are also compared. An experiment was carried out to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that the effects of static banners with audio mobile advertisement, and animation mobile advertisement were better than static banners in advertisement recognition and memorisation. The participants of websites providing location-based information had higher advertisement attitude and purchase intention than their web-based counterparts providing entertainment information.     

A generic content-based image retrieval framework for mobile devices

Multimedia mobile devices have created new possibilities for developing and accessing a variety of multimedia items such as images, audio and video clips. Personal multimedia items are, nowadays, being consumed at an enormous rate. Therefore, the management of these media items has become a pressing problem. In this paper, a client-server content-based image retrieval framework for mobile platforms is developed, which provides the capability of content-based query and browsing from mobile devices. The proposed framework provides an adaptive user interface and a generic structure, which supports a wide range of mobile devices. In this framework, a client requests the server for retrieval of particular images with a particular content. The server performs a content-based retrieval of images from a selected database and streams the retrieved results back to the client in an efficient way. The query results are transmitted over a wireless network and a certain number of similar images are rendered on the mobile device screen using thumbnail sizes. The proposed framework serves as a basis of content-based image retrieval on mobile devices. It addresses several important challenges such as hardware and software limitations as well as efficient use of the available network bandwidth.     

A survey of multimedia content adaptation for mobile devices

With continued increase in the use of smartphones, user expectations of content access have also increased. Most of the content that exists today is not designed for mobile devices. Mobile devices cannot directly access most of the content due to the mismatch in device capability and content playback requirements. Content adaptation is an essential tool that bridges the gap between device capabilities and content formats. In this paper we present an overview of content adaptation and survey recent papers on content adaptation for mobile devices. We introduce the when, where, and what of content adaptation to help classify the content adaptation techniques and to select the appropriate techniques for a given content delivery environment.     

A generic partial encryption scheme for low-power mobile devices

Content protection that allows only legitimate users to use specified content is essential in order to secure business in the consumer market. However, service providers and users suffer from low responsiveness when content is encrypted with traditional cryptographic tools that require strong decryption algorithms on mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce a generic partial encryption scheme for low-power mobile devices. Our primary goal is to design a generic architecture for partial encryption of downloadable and real-time streaming contents, and also to facilitate a trade-off between minimizing the encryption/decryption overhead and providing sufficient DRM security for the service provider. We also evaluate the efficacy of our proposed scheme by applying it to real-world multimedia contents. The results of our experiments indicate that encrypting only a small portion (about 2.5 %) of video content can effectively impose DRM restriction on the content. This significantly reduces the decryption overhead on low-power mobile devices. In the smart phone environment, it is shown that the time overhead during the decryption is less that 5 % of on-the-fly decoding time and the power overhead is reduced by up to 94.5 %, compared to the traditional full encryption scheme.     

A mobile instructional pervasive game method for language learning

Universal Access in the Information Society - In this paper, a mobile instructional pervasive game (M-IPG) learning method is proposed for improving students’ learning achievements with...     

A personal Web page tailoring toolkit for mobile devices

It is common to browse web pages via mobile devices. However, most of the web pages were designed for desktop computers equipped with big screens. When browsing on mobile devices, a user has to scroll up and down to find the information they want because of the limited screen size. Some commercial products reformat web pages. However, the result pages still contain irrelevant information. We propose a system to personalize users’ mobile web pages. A user can determine which blocks in a web page should be retained. The sequence of these blocks can also be altered according to individual preferences.     

面向移动设备的温度感知的任务调度算法

由于志愿者分布式计算可以为计算量庞大的科研项目提供足够的计算能力,甚至比超级计算机的计算能力还要强大,因此,志愿者分布式计算技术受到了很多研究人员的关注,很多不同的志愿者分布式计算架构被广泛应用。以往的很多志愿者分布式计算架构通常考虑的志愿者主机是PC电脑,或者单纯地把移动设备当作PC电脑一样进行处理。由于移动设备的很多特性跟PC电脑存在着很大的差异,所以很多时候这些志愿者分布式计算架构并不能高效地处理同时拥有PC电脑和移动设备志愿者的志愿计算项目。针对志愿者分布式计算系统上两个主流的志愿者分布式计算任务调度方法——迭代计算的任务调度算法和先来先服务的调度算法FCFS在处理移动设备志愿者计算上存在着的不足,为了提高志愿者分布式计算平台的执行效率,提出了一个面向移动设备的温度感知的任务调度算法TATSA。实验结果表明,TATSA比主流的任务调度算法ISA和FCFS在移动设备志愿者计算时效率明显更高。     

A study on stackable mosaic generation for mobile devices

With the growing use of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs, and digital cameras, photography has become an integral part of everyday life. In particular, mobile devices with cameras allow us to easily capture and modify photographs that can be shared via social networks. In this paper, we introduce a mobile device application for converting photographs into photomosaic images. In general, high-quality photomosaics require large databases. However, mobile devices have limited resources; hence it is difficult for such devices to support photomosaics. We propose a method that produces a photomosaic effect using a database that consists of rotatable images. We also propose a solution to the performance issue based on a best match search.     

A study of presentations of mobile web banners for location-based information and entertainment information websites

Compared to the Internet, mobile telecommunication has the characteristics of being anywhere, anytime and always online. As the growth of the Internet advertisements market slows down, there is a substantial increase in mobile advertisements. This research investigates the effectiveness of the presentation (static text and graphics, static text and graphics with audio, and animation) of mobile advertisements on the recognition of advertisements. The two types of websites for mobile advertisements – entertainment information and location-based information – are also compared. An experiment was carried out to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that the effects of static banners with audio mobile advertisement, and animation mobile advertisement were better than static banners in advertisement recognition and memorisation. The participants of websites providing location-based information had higher advertisement attitude and purchase intention than their web-based counterparts providing entertainment information.     

High-performance code optimizations for mobile devices

The Journal of Supercomputing - Mobile devices have seen their performance increased in latest years due to improvements on System on Chip technologies. These shared memory systems now integrate...