How Effectively Can Students’ Personal Smartphones be Used as Tools in Physics Labs?

This study seeks to answer the question of how effectively students can use their smartphones as tools for measuring and processing data when they perform physics experiments. The research was conducted in a local secondary school in Athens, Greece. The sample consisted of fifty-two 16-year-old students (10th grade). The students formed 26 pairs, and were asked to perform an experiment using their smartphones for measuring, processing and saving data, and then to email the data file to the researchers. During the implementation, students of each pair completed the steps on a worksheet. Two researchers monitored each pair individually and recorded scores and comments on evaluation sheets. The worksheets, the evaluation sheets, and the experimental data emailed by each pair constituted the data of the present study. The findings of the study show that the integration of students' smart mobile devices in the performance of physics experiments in the classroom or in the school lab is possible without posing particular problems. However, this integration presupposes the proper planning by the teacher and the dedication of appropriate time both for the preparation of the students for the activity, and for the installation of the necessary applications in the devices.

Revealing Cyber Threat of Smart Mobile Devices within Digital Ecosystem: User Information Security Awareness

In recent years, the number of mobile device users has increased at a significant rate due to the rapid technological advancement in mobile technology. While mobile devices are providing more useful features to its users, it has also made it possible for cyber threats to migrate from desktops to mobile devices. Thus, it is important for mobile device users to be aware that their mobile device could be exposed to cyber threats and that users could protect their devices by employing cyber security measures. This study discusses how users in responded to the smart mobile devices (SMD) breaches. A number of behavioural model theories are used to understand the user behaviour towards security features of smart mobile devices. To assess the impact of smart mobile devices (SMD) security and privacy, surveys had been conducted with users, stressing on product preferences, user behaviour of SMD, as well as perceptions on the security aspect of SMD. The results was very interesting, where the findings revealed that there were a lack of positive relationships between SMD users and their level of SMD security awareness. A new framework approach to securing SMD is proposed to ensure that users have strong protection over their data within SMD.

Where did my 256 GB go? A Measurement Analysis of Storage Consumption on Smart Mobile Devices

This work presents the first-ever detailed and large-scale measurement analysis of storage consumption behavior of applications (apps) on smart mobile devices. We start by carrying out a five-year longitudinal static analysis of millions of Android apps to study the increase in their sizes over time and identify various sources of app storage consumption. Our study reveals that mobile apps have evolved as large monolithic packages that are packed with features to monetize/engage users and optimized for performance at the cost of redundant storage consumption. We also carry out a mobile storage usage study with 140 Android participants. We built and deployed a lightweight context-aware storage tracing tool, called cosmos, on each participant's device. Leveraging the traces from our user study, we show that only a small fraction of apps/features are actively used and usage is correlated to user context. Our findings suggest a high degree of app feature bloat and unused functionality, which leads to inefficient use of storage. Furthermore, we found that apps are not constrained by storage quota limits, and developers freely abuse persistent storage by frequently caching data, creating debug logs, user analytics, and downloading advertisements as needed. Finally, drawing upon our findings, we discuss the need for efficient mobile storage management, and propose an elastic storage design to reclaim storage space when unused. We further identify research challenges and quantify expected storage savings from such a design. We believe our findings will be valuable to the storage research community as well as mobile app developers.

Visual Positioning in Indoor Environments Using RGB-D Images and Improved Vector of Local Aggregated Descriptors

Positioning information has become one of the most important information for processing and displaying on smart mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a visual positioning method using RGB-D image on smart mobile devices. Firstly, the pose of each image in the training set is calculated through feature extraction and description, image registration, and pose map optimization. Then, in the image retrieval stage, the training set and the query set are clustered to generate the vector of local aggregated descriptors (VLAD) description vector. In order to overcome the problem that the description vector loses the image color information and improve the retrieval accuracy under different lighting conditions, the opponent color information and depth information are added to the description vector for retrieval. Finally, using the point cloud corresponding to the retrieval result image and its pose, the pose of the retrieved image is calculated by perspective-n-point (PnP) method. The results of indoor scene positioning under different illumination conditions show that the proposed method not only improves the positioning accuracy compared with the original VLAD and ORB-SLAM2, but also has high computational efficiency.

Visual programming for the greation of digital shadow play performance using mobile devices in times of Covid-19

The design of a guided research project using an educational scenario based on a visual programming environment using smart mobile devices (smartphone, tablet) aimed at creating a digital shadow play performance. It was implemented in a classroom environment as part of the festive activities of the 4th Primary School of Nea Ionia Volos “Panagiotis Katsirelos” to celebrate the 200 years since the Greek Revolution. Moreover, the digital work that emerged was presented at the 10th Digital Creation Festival (Volos, Magnesia junction). The guided research project was approached interdisciplinary with the collaboration of teachers of Informatics, Theatrical Education, and general education teachers. The educational scenario was addressed to the 6th-grade primary school students. The students were already familiar with internet applications, ICT tools, and Scratch, a visual programming environment. The students used three smart mobile devices to create the final digital artifact with Scratch’s visual programming environment due to special learning conditions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.