Experiments

PhoneLab is a public smartphone testbed. We solicit researchers with exciting new ideas to experiment on PhoneLab that are made possible with PhoneLab’s ability to modifying the AOSP platform. Over the years, PhoneLab has facilitated the following smartphone platform experiments.

Ongoing

Completed

1. DefDroid

9/21/2015 - 11/3/2015

The goal of DefDroid is to make the mobile OS more defensive to curb the naughty apps that drain your battery or over-consume your mobile data, storage, etc. We design DefDroid so that it makes your mobile phone more sustainable without breaking the main functionalities of the apps.

Contact:
Ryan (Peng) Huang (Advisor: Prof. Yuanyuan Zhou)
UCSD

2. Lock Screen

10/22/2015 - 6/3/2016

This experiment looks at how users interact with their lock screens. We collect log information on whether a code-based lock is enabled, how much time is spent before unlocking the device, how long users take to enter the code and how many failed attempts occur. This information will help researchers to design lock screens with better security while maintaining or improving upon existing usage patterns.

Contact:
Marian Harbach (Advisor: Serge Egelman)
ICSI @ UC Berkeley

3. LTE Handover Analysis

10/28/2015 - 6/3/2016

This experiment aims to study the decision policy and performance impact of handovers including WiFi-Cellular handover, IRAT (Inter radio access technology) handover, and intra-LTE handover.

Contact
Shichang Shawn Xu (Advisor: Prof. Z. Morley Mao)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

4. Runtime Permission

11/24/2015 - 3/16/2016

This is a study on privacy preferences of mobile users when it comes to sensitive data requests originating from third party applications. To that end, we want to track sensitive data requests and ask users whether they want to block such requests as it happens. However we hope to prompt the question at most once per day per user when such a request occurs. We are also hoping to log surrounding contextual data when such a question is prompted to the user.

Contact:
Primal Wijesekera (Advisor: Prof. Konstanin Beznosov)
UC Berkeley & University of British Columbia

5. Maybe

11/13/2015 - 11/24/2015

One of the reasons programming mobile systems is so hard is the uncertainty created by the wide variety of environments a typical app encounters at runtime. In many cases only post-deployment user testing can determine the right algorithm to use, the rate at which something should happen, or when an app should attempt to conserve energy. Programmers should not be forced to make these choices at development time. But today’s programming languages leave no way for programmers to express and structure their uncertainty about runtime conditions, forcing them to adopt ineffective, fragile, and untested ad-hoc approaches to runtime adaptation. We introduce a new approach based on structured uncertainty through a new language construct: the maybe statement.

Contact:
Yihong Chen (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

6. File System Analysis

11/3/2015 - 11/13/2015

Centralized cloud storage services such as Dropbox have revolutionized the way that users share files and access data across their growing number of devices. But today’s cloud storage options have serious limitations affecting mobile battery-powered smartphones. Many central cloud storage providers require each client to have enough storage for an entire replica, which may not be feasible on smartphones with an order-of-magnitude less storage than laptops and desktops. Centralized cloud storage does not scale as users add more storage and misses the opportunity to harness free space users already have. And centralized cloud storage provides poor support for mobile devices, both failing to leverage natural mobility patterns when distributing data and potentially causing costly mobile data traffic.

Contact:
Carl Nuessle (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

7. Quality of Experience

11/3/2015 - 11/16/2015

Of all the resources that smartphones manage, human attention is the most precious. While processor speed and core count, memory and storage capacity, and network bandwidth have steadily and sometimes rapidly increased, the number of hours in the day has not. And as users spend an increasing amount of time with their personal computing devices, it is more important than ever that these devices ensure that their time is used effectively. We refer to this as quality of experience (QoE).

Contact:
Scott Haseley (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

8. Jouler

3/7/2016 - 3/16/2016

Despite the fact that current smartphone platforms already incorporate energy measurement tools and multiple energy control mechanisms, smartphone battery lifetimes continue to frustrate users. This is because measurements and mechanisms are of limited utility without policies that utilize them to achieve different energy management goals, such as meeting a lifetime target or providing good performance to a user’s favorite apps. To address this problem we are developing Jouler, a policy framework enabling effective and flexible smartphone energy management.

Contact:
Anudipa Maiti (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

9. Bluetooth Low Energy

11/03/2015 - 8/31/2016

We collect information that nearby BLE powered devices publicly broadcast. This enables us to study the privacy threats they pose. Please make sure you keep the Bluetooth radio turned on for sometime during the day.

Contact:
Kassem Fawaz (Advisor: Prof. Kang G. Shin)
RTCL @ University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

10. GridWatch: Crowdsourcing the Detection of Power Outages and Restorations

03/03/2016 - 8/31/2016

This experiment is gathering information to validate the GridWatch system. GridWatch is a system that attempts to crowd-source the detection of power outages and power restorations. These events are sensed using unmodified smartphones. The key insight is that when a charging phone stops charging, it might have experienced a power outage. When multiple phones that are nearby each other stop charging at the same time, it becomes more likely that an outage occurred. This same logic applies for power restorations, except instead of stopping charging, phones start charging. This experiment will gather your battery state (charging, not charging, percent charged) and your last known GPS location when battery state changes.

Contact:
Noah Klugman (Advisor: Prabal Dutta)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

11. Smartphone Storage Analysis

06/13/2016 - 8/31/2016

The purpose of this study is to determine the amount of storage space consumed by modern mobile apps on smartphones and effect of app usage on storage. The results will help developing the new generation of storage for smartphones and identifying minimum amount of storage space today’s smartphones must have.

Contact:
Ashish Bijlani (Advisor: Prof. Roy H. Campbell)
UIUC

12. CPU Thermal Management

03/31/2016 - 8/31/2016

This experiment aims to study the thermal characteristics of smartphones. We monitor the temperature of your smartphones and attempt to detect bad choices made by Android that make the phones run hot. Our goal is to use this information to prevent phones from (unnecessarily) overheating and also improve battery life.

Contact:
Guru Prasad Srinivasa and Scott Haseley (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

13. QoEye

07/04/2016 - 8/31/2016

QoEye collects high-level interactions with app components to help study Quality of Experience (QoE). Our goal is to discover common app usage patterns and to use this data to replay these interactions, eventually determining the contributing factors of QoE for various apps.

Contact:
Scott Haseley (Advisor: Geoffrey Challen)
University at Buffalo

14. TicToc: User Authentication through UI profiling

07/04/2016 - 8/31/2016

This study will record low-level interaction with the phone to study identifiable user-machine interaction abnormalities that are unique to each user. We hypothesize that this profiling low-level interaction will be useful in detecting impersonation attacks.

Contact:
Ahmed M Fawaz (Advisor: Prof. William H. Sanders)
UIUC

15. M2Auth

07/06/2016 - 8/31/2016

This experiment aims to explore the behavioral biometrics-the way that user interact with the smartphone, such as how user touching the screen instead of what user touch. This data will help us to design a Multi-Modal Authentication framework that incorporate different modalities of these biometrics.

Contact:
Ahmed Mahfouz (Advisor: Prof. Tarek Mahmoud)
Minia University, Egypt