Master Thesis: Exploiting Contextual Information acquired from Smartphones and Web Services for Higher-Level Data Analysis

Title:
Exploiting Contextual Information acquired from Smartphones and Web Services for Higher-Level Data Analysis

Description:
Context-awareness enables applications to adapt their behavior to the current situation the application is used in, including environmental conditions such as location, weather data, and else, as well as information about the user and the devices configuration. There are a broad variety of application scenarios where adding context awareness to services in order to adapt their behavior to the situation they are being used in increases the usability of the application. In order to model the context of a certain user or device, one has to gather information from certain sources (e.g., sensors, devices, web services, and else), thus providing a detailed description of the current situation. As mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, getting more and more popular, they represent an excellent source for environmental information, as they feature a broad variety of sensors and wireless techniques.

Objectives of this thesis are to develop an Android-based application for context information acquisition, which is able to collect any information accessible on the device and that transfers this data to a central server application for later data analysis. Other goals are to apply data mining or context modeling techniques on the data collected from multiple mobile devices correlated with various external web services in order to detect interesting and previously unknown higher-level information. Examples could be mobile traffic usage linked to weather forecasts in order to determine, if users use their smartphone differently when the weather is good or bad.

The basic objectives of this thesis are:

• Identify relevant context information sources for later interpretation.
• Implement applications that acquire this information from mobile devices and/or web services.
• Implement a server entity that collects the gathered data in a central database.
• Apply data mining techniques and/or context modeling and reasoning techniques in order to analyze the available data.

Challenges:

• Strong practical relevance (working with current mobile technologies, e.g. Android as well as web technologies)
• Model and analyze the acquired data

Prerequisites:

• Proficiency in software development (concept and implementation)
• Practical experience and/or background knowledge in DBMS, mobile technologies/OS and web technologies might be useful
• Interest to work in the field of mobile computing, web development and data mining/analysis

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Axel Küpper, Abdulbaki Uzun, Sebastian Göndör

Type: Master Thesis

Duration: 6 months