Smart phones with unlimited applications are considered essential for modern day lifestyle, hence the number of cell phone users has sky rocketed in this decade. The high percentage of children and teenagers carrying ...Smart phones with unlimited applications are considered essential for modern day lifestyle, hence the number of cell phone users has sky rocketed in this decade. The high percentage of children and teenagers carrying cell phones has caused controversy on how justified having a minor carrying a communication device is. There is no doubt about the fact that parents have to be able to contact their children, however, a child with a phone and poor judgment will most probably be vulnerable to the outer world with all its’ threats and abuses. Furthermore, we have the serious health issues related to wireless devices effects on people, under those circumstances multiple solutions have been presented for a safe secure method for parents to track their children without the need of cell phones. The proposed alternatives included phones with limited privileges for children;these phones are restricted to the ability of calling specific people only and have already installed applications for tracking location. Our proposed system “kids’ tracker” includes a wearable device for the child and an Android application on the parents’ smart phone. Kids’ tracker has shown a very decent performance with many unique features compared to other existing solutions.展开更多
Mobile applications(apps for short)often need to display images.However,inefficient image displaying(IID)issues are pervasive in mobile apps,and can severely impact app performance and user experience.This paper first...Mobile applications(apps for short)often need to display images.However,inefficient image displaying(IID)issues are pervasive in mobile apps,and can severely impact app performance and user experience.This paper first establishes a descriptive framework for the image displaying procedures of IID issues.Based on the descriptive framework,we conduct an empirical study of 216 real-world IID issues collected from 243 popular open-source Android apps to validate the presence and severity of IID issues,and then shed light on these issues’characteristics to support research on effective issue detection.With the findings of this study,we propose a static IID issue detection tool TAPIR and evaluate it with 243 real-world Android apps.Encouragingly,49 and 64 previously-unknown IID issues in two different versions of 16 apps reported by TAPIR are manually confirmed as true positives,respectively,and 16 previously-unknown IID issues reported by TAPIR have been confirmed by developers and 13 have been fixed.Then,we further evaluate the performance impact of these detected IID issues and the performance improvement if they are fixed.The results demonstrate that the IID issues detected by TAPIR indeed cause significant performance degradation,which further show the effectiveness and efficiency of TAPIR.展开更多
Learning programming can be a daunting task, especially for students without a programming background or non-computer science students. Most Geographic Information Science (GIS) experts and students come from a non-pr...Learning programming can be a daunting task, especially for students without a programming background or non-computer science students. Most Geographic Information Science (GIS) experts and students come from a non-programming background and the development of applications has mostly been perceived to be a field for computer science students and has mostly been shunned by other non-programming students and courses. Compounded by the availability of Open-Source Data collection tools like the Open Data Kit (ODK), learning programming and android application development is often overlooked by Geo Spatial Scientists. Many studies have been done to identify a suitable application development kit to introduce application development to students in non-programming classes. MIT App inventor is a user-friendly drag-and-drop application development platform that is ideal for introducing application development to students with a non-programming background. In this paper, students doing an undergraduate honors degree in spatial sciences were introduced to the MIT App inventor for the development of a Geo-App capable of collecting spatial data that can be exported into a GIS system like Arc GIS, and QGIS after the data has been collected. The paper investigates the suitability of MIT App Inventor in the development of Geo-Spatial Applications. The application was developed for collaborative mapping of tick species for Mashonaland Central Province in Zimbabwe. The main purpose of the application developed is to act as a tool for veterinary extension workers under the Veterinary Services Department of Mashonaland Central Province allowing them to collect location information for tick monitoring. The application helps expansion workers to moreover outwardly communicate the circumstance at the tick controlling focuses such as plunge tanks by collaboratively making an outline and uploading multimedia records subsequently with an alternative of making calls straight to the veterinary call center in near real-time.展开更多
文摘Smart phones with unlimited applications are considered essential for modern day lifestyle, hence the number of cell phone users has sky rocketed in this decade. The high percentage of children and teenagers carrying cell phones has caused controversy on how justified having a minor carrying a communication device is. There is no doubt about the fact that parents have to be able to contact their children, however, a child with a phone and poor judgment will most probably be vulnerable to the outer world with all its’ threats and abuses. Furthermore, we have the serious health issues related to wireless devices effects on people, under those circumstances multiple solutions have been presented for a safe secure method for parents to track their children without the need of cell phones. The proposed alternatives included phones with limited privileges for children;these phones are restricted to the ability of calling specific people only and have already installed applications for tracking location. Our proposed system “kids’ tracker” includes a wearable device for the child and an Android application on the parents’ smart phone. Kids’ tracker has shown a very decent performance with many unique features compared to other existing solutions.
基金supported by the Leading-Edge Technology Program of Jiangsu Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.BK20202001the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.61932021.
文摘Mobile applications(apps for short)often need to display images.However,inefficient image displaying(IID)issues are pervasive in mobile apps,and can severely impact app performance and user experience.This paper first establishes a descriptive framework for the image displaying procedures of IID issues.Based on the descriptive framework,we conduct an empirical study of 216 real-world IID issues collected from 243 popular open-source Android apps to validate the presence and severity of IID issues,and then shed light on these issues’characteristics to support research on effective issue detection.With the findings of this study,we propose a static IID issue detection tool TAPIR and evaluate it with 243 real-world Android apps.Encouragingly,49 and 64 previously-unknown IID issues in two different versions of 16 apps reported by TAPIR are manually confirmed as true positives,respectively,and 16 previously-unknown IID issues reported by TAPIR have been confirmed by developers and 13 have been fixed.Then,we further evaluate the performance impact of these detected IID issues and the performance improvement if they are fixed.The results demonstrate that the IID issues detected by TAPIR indeed cause significant performance degradation,which further show the effectiveness and efficiency of TAPIR.
文摘Learning programming can be a daunting task, especially for students without a programming background or non-computer science students. Most Geographic Information Science (GIS) experts and students come from a non-programming background and the development of applications has mostly been perceived to be a field for computer science students and has mostly been shunned by other non-programming students and courses. Compounded by the availability of Open-Source Data collection tools like the Open Data Kit (ODK), learning programming and android application development is often overlooked by Geo Spatial Scientists. Many studies have been done to identify a suitable application development kit to introduce application development to students in non-programming classes. MIT App inventor is a user-friendly drag-and-drop application development platform that is ideal for introducing application development to students with a non-programming background. In this paper, students doing an undergraduate honors degree in spatial sciences were introduced to the MIT App inventor for the development of a Geo-App capable of collecting spatial data that can be exported into a GIS system like Arc GIS, and QGIS after the data has been collected. The paper investigates the suitability of MIT App Inventor in the development of Geo-Spatial Applications. The application was developed for collaborative mapping of tick species for Mashonaland Central Province in Zimbabwe. The main purpose of the application developed is to act as a tool for veterinary extension workers under the Veterinary Services Department of Mashonaland Central Province allowing them to collect location information for tick monitoring. The application helps expansion workers to moreover outwardly communicate the circumstance at the tick controlling focuses such as plunge tanks by collaboratively making an outline and uploading multimedia records subsequently with an alternative of making calls straight to the veterinary call center in near real-time.
