Computing and Information Systems - Theses
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ItemValidating context-driven features of mobile applications using laboratory testing( 2019)Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets now embed a variety of sensors that can provide context-driven services to increasingly large user bases. Driven by the richness of heterogeneous data and machine learning algorithms, context-driven mobile applications are becoming increasingly popular across a variety of domains, including location-based services, urban sensing and e-health. Although developers and researchers have proposed a significant number of mobile context development frameworks and testing tools to simplify the development and testing of context-driven mobile applications, it remains a challenge to efficiently and systematically validate the context-driven features of mobile applications. Real-world tests are often impractical, time-consuming and involve high cost. In this thesis, we propose three approaches to alleviate these problems by enabling efficient and systematic validation of the context-driven features of mobile applications in low-cost laboratory settings. First, we present TestAWARE, a laboratory-based testing tool that facilitates efficient and systematic validation of context-driven mobile applications on Android. We demonstrate that TestAWARE can help testers validate functional properties and non-functional properties of mobile applications. Second, we propose a validation approach for the real-time sensing performance of context-driven mobile applications. We show that the performance properties of real-time sensing applications can be efficiently and systematically measured in the laboratory. Third, we present a validation approach that considers a variety of aspects of machine learning design in context-driven mobile applications. We demonstrate that testers can efficiently and systematically validate multiple machine learning design choices in the laboratory. In addition, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of laboratory testing techniques in general. We also provide some deliberations about the impacts of laboratory testing techniques on the software development process. Our approaches are supported by theoretical investigation, empirical evaluation and peer-reviewed publications. Overall, this thesis has significantly enhanced existing methodologies to validate the context-driven features of mobile applications.
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ItemIndexing to situated interactions( 2006-02)Computing is increasingly pervading the activities of our everyday lives: at work, at home, and out on the town. When designing these pervasive systems there is a need to better understand and incorporate the context of use and yet there are limited empirical investigations into what constitutes this context. The user’s physical and social situation is an important part of their context when operating in an urban environment and thus needs to be understood and included in the interaction design of context-aware pervasive computing. This thesis has combined ideas from human computer interaction (HCI) and architecture to investigate indexicality in interface design as an instrument for incorporating physical and social context of the built environment into context-aware pervasive computing. Indexicality in interface design is a new approach to designing HCI for pervasive computing that relies on knowledge of current context to implicitly communicate between system and user. It reduces the amount of information that needs to be explicitly displayed in the interface while maintaining the usefulness and understandability of the communication.