MicroMAIS: executing and orchestrating Web services on constrained mobile devices

Mobile devices with their more and more powerful resources allow the development of mobile information systems in which services are not only provided by traditional systems but also autonomously executed and controlled in the mobile devices themselves. Services distributed on autonomous mobile devices allow both the development of cooperative applications without a back‐end infrastructure and the development of applications blending distributed and centralized services. In this paper, we propose MicroMAIS: an integrated platform for supporting the execution of Web service‐based applications natively on a mobile device. The MicroMAIS platform is composed of mAS and μ‐BPEL. The former allows the execution of a single Web service, whereas the latter permits the orchestration of several Web services according to the WS‐BPEL standard. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Realtime training on mobile devices for face recognition applications

Due to the increases in processing power and storage capacity of mobile devices over the years, an incorporation of realtime face recognition to mobile devices is no longer unattainable. However, the possibility of the realtime learning of a large number of samples within mobile devices must be established. In this paper, we attempt to establish this possibility by presenting a realtime training algorithm in mobile devices for face recognition related applications. This is differentiated from those traditional algorithms which focused on realtime classification. In order to solve the challenging realtime issue in mobile devices, we extract local face features using some local random bases and then a sequential neural network is trained incrementally with these features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the feasibility of its application in mobile devices through empirical experiments. Our results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms several popular face recognition methods with a dramatic reduction in computational speed. Moreover, only the proposed method shows the ability to train additional samples incrementally in realtime without memory failure and accuracy degradation using a recent mobile phone model.     

XMobile: A MB-UID environment for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices

Ubiquitous Computing promises seamless access to information anytime, anywhere with different and heterogeneous devices. This kind of environment imposes new challenges to software development. For example, information and user interface should be adapted according to contextual characteristics such as user, environment, and access device. In case of device adaptation, the development challenge is related to the heterogeneity of the devices, which requires software engineers to create different versions for each type of device and every platform. This paper proposes a MB-UID (model-based user interface development) approach for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices. An environment, called XMobile, offers a device-independent user interface framework and a code generation tool for providing fast development of multi-platform and adaptive applications according to device and platform features. A case study is also presented to illustrate how the environment can be used for constructing an application for heterogeneous devices with different network connectivity modes.     

Automatic adaptation of mobile applications to different user devices using modular mobile agents

Wearable, handheld, and embedded or standalone intelligent devices are becoming quite common and can support a diverse range of applications. In order to simplify development of applications which can adapt to a variety of mobile devices, we propose an adaptation framework which includes three techniques: follow‐me, context‐aware adaptation, and remote control scheme. For the first, we construct a personal agent capable of carrying its owner's applications. Second, we design a personal agent capable of carrying applications with an adaptable hierarchical structure. Then, applications can be adapted approximately to the context of evices by using an attribute‐based component decision algorithm. Finally, to achieve a remote control scheme, we distribute the computational load of applications on the resource‐restricted mobile devices. An application is divided into two parts that can be executed on a user device and a server separately. In short, this framework facilitates the development of widespread applications for ubiquitous computing environments. Furthermore, it enables the applications to follow their owners and automatically adapt to different devices. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SmartVisionApp: A framework for computer vision applications on mobile devices

In this paper a novel framework for the development of computer vision applications that exploit sensors available in mobile devices is presented. The framework is organized as a client–server application that combines mobile devices, network technologies and computer vision algorithms with the aim of performing object recognition starting from photos captured by a phone camera. The client module on the mobile device manages the image acquisition and the query formulation tasks, while the recognition module on the server executes the search on an existing database and sends back relevant information to the client. To show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, the implementation of two possible plug-ins for specific problems is described: landmark recognition and fashion shopping. Experiments on four different landmark datasets and one self-collected dataset of fashion accessories show that the system is efficient and robust in the presence of objects with different characteristics.     

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.     

Personalized recommendation of popular blog articles for mobile applications

Weblogs have emerged as a new communication and publication medium on the Internet for diffusing the latest useful information. Providing value-added mobile services, such as blog articles, is increasingly important to attract mobile users to mobile commerce, in order to benefit from the proliferation and convenience of using mobile devices to receive information any time and anywhere. However, there are a tremendous number of blog articles, and mobile users generally have difficulty in browsing weblogs owing to the limitations of mobile devices. Accordingly, providing mobile users with blog articles that suit their particular interests is an important issue. Very little research, however, has focused on this issue.In this work, we propose a novel Customized Content Service on a mobile device (m-CCS) to filter and push blog articles to mobile users. The m-CCS includes a novel forecasting approach to predict the latest popular blog topics based on the trend of time-sensitive popularity of weblogs. Mobile users may, however, have different interests regarding the latest popular blog topics. Thus, the m-CCS further analyzes the mobile users’ browsing logs to determine their interests, which are then combined with the latest popular blog topics to derive their preferred blog topics and articles. A novel hybrid approach is proposed to recommend blog articles by integrating personalized popularity of topic clusters, item-based collaborative filtering (CF) and attention degree (click times) of blog articles. The experiment result demonstrates that the m-CCS system can effectively recommend mobile users’ desired blog articles with respect to both popularity and personal interests.     

Visual quality of watermarking for mobile devices

Abstract— In this study, the visual quality of watermarked images, displayed on mobile devices, are evaluated. A watermarking technique in the spatial domain where a watermark is embedded into an image is considered. Three different types of images are considered and for each image five values of watermarking magnitude were tested. The difference in human evaluation of visual quality of a watermarked image, depending upon image properties and the properties of a display was evaluated. In visual assessment tests, images from a mobile phone, PDA, and CRT were used. The visual quality of watermarked image was evaluated by 20 human observers. The results were quantified using statistical testing. The results show that for high‐end displays the magnitude used for watermarking is a critical factor in image quality. In mobile devices the magnitude used for watermarking has little visual effect, especially for technical drawings. Recommendations for proper parameters are given.     

An adaptive web page layout structure for small devices

The limited display size of current small Internet devices is becoming a serious obstacle to information access. In this paper, we introduce a Document REpresentation for Scalable Structures (DRESS) to help information providers make composite documents, typically web pages, scalable in both logic and layout structure to support effective information acquisition in heterogeneous environments. Through this novel document representation structure based on binary slicing trees, the document can dynamically adapt its presentation according to display sizes by maximizing the information throughput to users. We discuss the details of this structure with its key attributes. An automatic approach for generating this structure for existing web pages is also presented. A branch-and-bound algorithm and a capacity ratio-based slicing method are proposed to select proper content representation and aesthetic document layouts respectively. A set of user study experiments have been carried out and the results show that compared with the thumbnail-based approach, the DRESS-based interface can reduce browsing time by 23.5%. This work was performed when the second and the third authors were visiting students at Microsoft Research Asia.     

CAD data visualization on mobile devices using sequential constrained Delaunay triangulation

3D graphic rendering in mobile application programs is becoming increasingly popular with rapid advances in mobile device technology. Current 3D graphic rendering engines for mobile devices do not provide triangulation capabilities for surfaces; therefore, mobile 3D graphic applications have been dealing only with pre-tessellated geometric data. Since triangulation is comparatively expensive in terms of computation, real-time tessellation cannot be easily implemented on mobile devices with limited resources. No research has yet been reported on real-time triangulation on mobile devices.In this paper, we propose a real-time triangulation algorithm for visualization on mobile devices based on sequential constrained Delaunay triangulation. We apply a compact data structure and a sequential triangulation process for visualization of CAD data on mobile devices. In order to achieve a high performance and compact implementation of the triangulation, the nature of the CAD data is fully considered in the computational process. This paper also presents a prototype implementation for a mobile 3D CAD viewer running on a handheld Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).     

Evaluation of motion-based interaction for mobile devices: A case study on image browsing

This article evaluates the usability of motion sensing-based interaction on a mobile platform using image browsing as a representative task. Three types of interfaces, a physical button interface, a motion-sensing interface using a high-precision commercial 3D motion tracker, and a motion-sensing interface using an in-house low-cost 3D motion tracker, are compared in terms of task performance and subjective preference. Participants were provided with prolonged training over 20 days, in order to compensate for the participants’ unfamiliarity with the motion-sensing interfaces. Experimental results showed that the participants’ task performance and subjective preference for the two motion-sensing interfaces were initially low, but they rapidly improved with training and soon approached the level of the button interface. Furthermore, a recall test, which was conducted 4 weeks later, demonstrated that the usability gains were well retained in spite of the long time gap between uses. Overall, these findings highlight the potential of motion-based interaction as an intuitive interface for mobile devices.     

Seed-based authentication for mobile clients across multiple devices

Authenticating users for mobile cloud apps has been a major security issue in recent years. Traditional passwords ensure the security of mobile applications, but it also requires extra effort from users to memorize complex passwords. Seed-based authentication can simplify the process of authentication for mobile users. In the seed-based authentication, images can be used as credentials for a mobile app. A seed is extracted from an image and used to generate one-time tokens for login. Compared to complex passwords, images are more friendly to mobile users. Previous work had been done in seed-based authentication which focused on providing authentication from a single device. It is common that a mobile user may have two or more mobile devices. Authenticating the same user on different devices is challenging due to several aspects, such as maintaining the same credential for multiple devices and distinguishing different users. In this article, we aimed at developing a solution to address these issues. We proposed multiple-device authentication algorithms to identify users. We adopted a one-time token paradigm to ensure the security of mobile applications. In addition, we tried to minimize the authentication latency for better performance. Our simulation showed that the proposed algorithms can improve the average latency of authentication for 40% at most, compared to single-device solutions.     

面向移动终端的隐私数据安全存储及自毁方案

针对移动终端隐私数据的安全问题,结合数据压缩、门限秘密共享和移动社交网络,提出一种面向移动终端的隐私数据安全存储及自毁方案.首先,对移动隐私数据进行无损压缩获得压缩数据.然后,使用对称密钥对压缩数据进行对称加密获得原始密文.接着,将原始密文分解成两部分密文块:其中一部分密文块与时间属性结合并封装成移动数据自毁对象(MDSO)后保存到云服务器中;另一部分密文块与对称密钥和时间属性结合,再经过拉格朗日多项式处理后获得密文分量.最后,将这些密文分量分别嵌入图片并共享到移动社交网络.当超过授权期后,任何用户都无法获取密文块重组出原始密文,从而无法恢复隐私数据,最终实现移动隐私数据的安全自毁.实验结果表明:当文件为10 KB时,压缩和加密时间之和仅为22 ms,说明所提方案性能开销较低.综合分析亦表明该方案具备较高安全性,能有效抵抗安全攻击,保护移动隐私数据的隐私安全.     

一种支持移动终端浏览网页的5C处理方法

主要研究基于移动终端的网页融合处理方法,目的是实现在移动终端上无缝地浏览互联网页。要在移动终端上顺利浏览此页面,需要克服移动网络的带宽限制和移动终端的处理能力限制。分析了此种情况,将问题转化为给定一个网页的HTML源文件,解决突破带宽限制和终端处理能力限制的问题;从而提出了一种5C融合处理方法：通过5C处理流程（Convert,Cut,Compress,Cache,Converge）,得出最适合移动终端的HTML源文件,支持在移动终端上顺利的浏览互联网页面。     

多种移动终端设备管理模式的研究与实现

随着终端的多样化,先前的管理单一设备的技术暴露出种种弊端,探讨了终端设备的特点和管理的技术．在这技术基础上做了改进,使用XML描述各种终端设备信息和性能指标,改进访问速度和增加索引技术,以Web Service方式实现终端设备管理的服务平台．改进后的设备管理技术具有高效、灵活、可扩展性、可重用性等特点,并且在移动证券服务系统中付之实施,取得了良好的效果。     

基于XML的移动设备人机交互引擎

基于传统的移动设备领域人机交互界面的开发的现状以及特点设计了一种移动应用的开发模型。为了提高移动设备应用开发的效率和人机交互界面的质量,结合这种模型,提出了一种引擎设计方案。这种引擎(称为XmlSupervisor)采用面向服务的体系结构（SOA）的思想,通过将界面、逻辑代码和资源相分离的方案进行设计,可以支持利用可扩展标记语言(XML)的良好的扩展性、自描述性、跨平台性、树状存储结构等特点来开发的人机交互界面,为移动设备的人机交互界面的设计和开发提供了参考。     

Using RSS feeds for effective mobile web browsing

While mobile phones are becoming more popular, wireless communication vendors and device manufacturers are seeking new applications for their products. Access to the large corpus of Internet information is a very prominent field. However, the technical limitations of mobile devices pose many challenges. Browsing the Internet using a mobile phone is a large scientific and cultural challenge. Web content must be adapted before it can be accessed by a mobile browser. This work presents a new methodology that uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds for the adaptation of web content for use in mobile phones. This methodology is based on concrete design guidelines and supports different viewing modes. The mobile tool provided using the RSS feeds is evaluated based on user-centered evaluation and the results are presented.     

面向移动终端的隐式身份认证机制综述

面向移动终端的隐式身份认证机制通过监测移动终端环境以及用户行为等信息对用户进行透明且持续地认证,能够增强现有身份认证机制的可用性与安全性。该文对隐式身份认证技术的研究现状进行介绍。介绍了基于本地与基于网络的隐式身份认证框架;归纳总结出五类数据采集方式;对基于机器学习等多种用户分类算法进行了介绍,分析比较了各算法的正确率;归纳出两类访问控制机制,并对隐式身份认证所面临的模拟行为攻击以及用户隐私泄漏安全问题进行了讨论。     

Testing Web-based applications: The state of the art and future trends

Software testing is a difficult task and testing Web-based applications may be even more difficult, due to the peculiarities of such applications. In the last years, several problems in the field of Web-based applications testing have been addressed by research work, and several methods and techniques have been defined and used to test Web-based applications effectively. This paper will present the main differences between Web-based applications and traditional ones, how these differences impact the testing of the former ones, and some relevant contributions in the field of Web application testing developed in recent years. The focus is mainly on testing the functionality of a Web-based application, even if some discussion about the testing of non-functional requirements is provided too. Some indications about future trends in Web application testing are also outlined in the paper.