No Arabic abstract
In this paper we present the first population-level, city-scale analysis of application usage on smartphones. Using deep packet inspection at the network operator level, we obtained a geo-tagged dataset with more than 6 million unique devices that launched more than 10,000 unique applications across the city of Shanghai over one week. We develop a technique that leverages transfer learning to predict which applications are most popular and estimate the whole usage distribution based on the Point of Interest (POI) information of that particular location. We demonstrate that our technique has an 83.0% hitrate in successfully identifying the top five popular applications, and a 0.15 RMSE when estimating usage with just 10% sampled sparse data. It outperforms by about 25.7% over the existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our findings pave the way for predicting which apps are relevant to a user given their current location, and which applications are popular where. The implications of our findings are broad: it enables a range of systems to benefit from such timely predictions, including operating systems, network operators, appstores, advertisers, and service providers.
The advancement of smartphones with various type of sensors enabled us to harness diverse information with crowd sensing mobile application. However, traditional approaches have suffered drawbacks such as high battery consumption as a trade off to obtain high accuracy data using high sampling rate. To mitigate the battery consumption, we proposed low sampling point of interest (POI) extraction framework, which is built upon validation based stay points detection (VSPD) and sensor fusion based environment classification (SFEC). We studied various of clustering algorithm and showed that density based spatial clustering of application with noise(DBSCAN) algorithms produce most accurate result among existing methods. The SFEC model is utilized for classifying the indoor or outdoor environment of the POI clustered earlier by VSPD. Real world data are collected, bench-marked using existing clustering method to denote effectiveness of low sampling rate model in high noise spatial temporal data.
By using modern cryptographic techniques, privacy-preserving Automated Exposure Notification (AEN) technologies offer the promise of mitigating disease spread by automatically recording contacts between people over the incubation period while maintaining individual data privacy. Today, public health departments in States and other countries around the world are deploying AEN systems at a rapid pace. Though many organizations conducted research prior to deploying apps, experience around the world shows that contact-tracing apps are installed and used at relatively low levels. This whitepaper is intended to provide usable information for States who are considering the deployment of an AEN system, as well as to guide ongoing improvements for States that have already deployed. We outline the human factors considerations related to employing AEN systems with the ultimate goal of controlling the spread of COVID-19, including the GAEN consortium Exposure Notifications (EN) Express tool. We will also provide a practical design and implementation guide for States and others designing and deploying AEN systems, as well as a set of recommendations for assessing deployment of contact tracing apps and targeting areas of concern to improve efficacy of use during and after initial deployment. As a case study, we consider the commercial app deployed by the state of Pennsylvania (PA) and the ongoing efforts to drive user adoption there.
Mobile devices have evolved from just communication devices into an indispensable part of peoples lives in form of smartphones, tablets and smart watches. Devices are now more personal than ever and carry more information about a person than any other. Extracting user behaviour is rather difficult and time-consuming as most of the work previously has been manual or requires feature extraction. In this paper, a novel approach of user behavior detection is proposed with Deep Learning Network (DNN). Initial approach was to use recurrent neural network (RNN) along with LSTM for completely unsupervised analysis of mobile devices. Next approach is to extract features by using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to understand the user behaviour, which are then fed into the Convolution Neural Network (CNN). This work mainly concentrates on detection of user behaviour and anomaly detection for usage analysis of mobile devices. Both the approaches are compared against some baseline methods. Experiments are conducted on the publicly available dataset to show that these methods can successfully capture the user behaviors.
The apps installed on a smartphone can reveal much information about a user, such as their medical conditions, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Additionally, the presence or absence of particular apps on a smartphone can inform an adversary who is intent on attacking the device. In this paper, we show that a passive eavesdropper can feasibly identify smartphone apps by fingerprinting the network traffic that they send. Although SSL/TLS hides the payload of packets, side-channel data such as packet size and direction is still leaked from encrypted connections. We use machine learning techniques to identify smartphone apps from this side-channel data. In addition to merely fingerprinting and identifying smartphone apps, we investigate how app fingerprints change over time, across devices and across differe
In-app advertising closely relates to app revenue. Reckless ad integration could adversely impact app reliability and user experience, leading to loss of income. It is very challenging to balance the ad revenue and user experience for app developers. In this paper, we present a large-scale analysis on ad-related user feedback. The large user feedback data from App Store and Google Play allow us to summarize ad-related app issues comprehensively and thus provide practical ad integration strategies for developers. We first define common ad issues by manually labeling a statistically representative sample of ad-related feedback, and then build an automatic classifier to categorize ad-related feedback. We study the relations between different ad issues and user ratings to identify the ad issues poorly scored by users. We also explore the fix durations of ad issues across platforms for extracting insights into prioritizing ad issues for ad maintenance. We summarize 15 types of ad issues by manually annotating 903/36,309 ad-related user reviews. From a statistical analysis of 36,309 ad-related reviews, we find that users care most about the number of unique ads and ad display frequency during usage. Besides, users tend to give relatively lower ratings when they report the security and notification related issues. Regarding different platforms, we observe that the distributions of ad issues are significantly different between App Store and Google Play. Moreover, some ad issue types are addressed more quickly by developers than other ad issues. We believe the findings we discovered can benefit app developers towards balancing ad revenue and user experience while ensuring app reliability.