A few months ago the MOBILESoft FB community voted the most interesting topics to be presented at the future of mobile software engineering track @MOBILESoft 2017.
The four selected topics were: security, energy and performance, testing v&v, and mobile ecosystems and IoT.
Topic #1 – Energy and Performance
Abhik Roychoudhury
National University of Singapore
Bio: Abhik Roychoudhury is a Professor of Computer Science at School of Computing, National University of Singapore. Abhik received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2000. Since 2001, he has been employed at the National University of Singapore. His research has focused on software testing and analysis, software security, and trust-worthy software construction. He has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker (2013-19). He is currently leading the TSUNAMi center, a large five-year long targeted research effort funded by National Research Foundation in the domain of software security. He is also the Lead Principal Investigator of the Singapore Cyber-security Consortium. He is currently also collaborating on Test1080, a spin-off effort on Android app testing.
He has authored a book on “Embedded Systems and Software Validation” published by Elsevier (Morgan Kaufmann) Systems-on-Silicon series in 2009, which has also been officially translated to Chinese by Tsinghua University Press. He has served in various capacities in the program committees and organizing committees of various conferences on software engineering, specifically serving as Program Chair of ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2016 and General Chair of ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) 2022. He is currently serving as an Editorial Board member of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
“Future of Mobile Software for Smartphones and Drones: Energy and Performance”
Abstract: The need for performance and energy efficiency in mobile devices is apparent with the obvious shifting of more intensive computation to mobile platforms. In this talk, we first make a clear distinction between performance and energy issues. Apart from showing that performance efficiency is neither co-related with energy efficiency nor inefficiency, we focus on programming methodologies and software validation approaches for producing energy efficient mobile software. These include reviewing recent works on energy-aware programming and non-functional testing to expose energy and performance issues in mobile software.
As mobile platforms continue to evolve, new scenarios and use-cases involving mobile devices are on the rise. We speculate on scenarios involving energy hungry mobile software in the near future, and how software engineering techniques can combat energy inefficiency in such scenarios. These include the need to synergize various mobile devices in health-care applications involving elderly patients, as well as the need to effectively manipulate software-controlled personal drones which are likely to become main-stream in the near future.
Topic #2 – Mobile ecosystems and IoT
Fahim Kawsar
Bell Labs
Bio: Dr Fahim Kawsar leads the Internet of Things research at Bell Labs and holds a Design United Professorship at TU Delft. His current research explores novel algorithms and system design techniques to build transformative multi-sensory systems for disruptive mobile, wearable and IoT services. He borrows tenets from Social Psychology, learns from Behavioural Economics and applies Computer Science methods to drive his research. He is a frequent keynote, panel and tutorial speaker, hold 15+ patents, organised and chaired numerous conferences, (co-)authored 100+ publications and had projects commissioned. He is a former Microsoft Research Fellow and has worked before at Nokia Research, and Lancaster University. His work and publications can be viewed at http://www.fahim-kawsar.net.
“Computational Behaviour Modelling for the Internet of Things”
Abstract: We are observing a monumental effort from the industry and academia to make everything connected. Naturally, to understand the needs of these connected things, we need a better understanding of humans and where, when, and how they interact. This behavioural understanding would help us to create digital services and capabilities that fundamentally change the way we experience our lives. In this talk, I will explore the system and algorithmic challenges in modelling human behaviour. I will discuss how mobile and wearable devices together with the wireless network can be used as a multi-sensory computational platform to learn and infer human behaviour and to design user-centred connected services across Enterprise, Urban City and Lifestyle.
Topic #3 – Securying Mobile Systems
Eric Bodden
Heinz Nixdorf Institute, Paderborn University & Fraunhofer IEM
Bio: Eric Bodden is one of the leading experts on secure software engineering, with a specialty in building highly precise tools for automated program analysis. He is Professor for Software Engineering at Paderborn University and director for Software Engineering at Fraunhofer IEM. Further, he is a member of the directorate of the Collaborative Research Center CROSSING at TU Darmstadt.
At Fraunhofer IEM, Bodden is heading the Attract-Group on Secure Software Engineering. In this function he is developing code analysis technology for security, in collaboration with the leading national and international software development companies. In 2016, Bodden’s research group scored 1st place at the German IT-Security Price. In 2014, the DFG awarded Bodden the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis. Additionally, Bodden has won several industrial research awards by companies such as Oracle and Google.
“From reactive to proactive mobile security”
Abstract: Over the past few years, my research group and others have developed powerful static and dynamic analysis tools to help judge the security and vulnerability of mobile applications. This research has carried a long way, with some technologies now actually being used to scan mobile apps as they enter popular marketplaces. In this talk I will overview some of the most important challenges and achievements, but I will also argue that we as a community should now seek the shift from this reactive approach to mobile security to more constructive methods. While providing stronger security guarantees than desktop operating systems, current mobile platforms nevertheless violate important security principles such as the principle of least privilege and the principle of distrustful decomposition. This prevents an optimal hardening of mobile apps against attacks. To alleviate this problem, one will require either changes to mobile operating systems or powerful application-level tool support, and sufficient automation such as not to overwhelm end users with overly complex security decisions. I will outline how those challenges form a new and important direction of research.
Topic #4 – Testing and Verification of Mobile Systems
Mark Harman
UCL
Bio: Mark Harman is an engineering manager at Facebook and a professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at University College London. At UCL he directed the CREST centre and was Head of Software Systems Engineering until January 2017. He is widely known for work on source code analysis, software testing, app store analysis and Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE), a field he co-founded and which has grown rapidly to include over 1,600 authors spread over more than 40 countries. His SBSE and testing work has been used by many organisations including Daimler, Ericsson, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Visa. Prof. Harman also co-founded Appredict, an app store analytics company, spun out from UCL’s UCLappA group, and Majicke, and automated test data generation start up. In February 2017, the three Majicke co-founders moved to Facebook.
“Automated Mobile App Testing”
Abstract: This talk covers automated test case design for mobile systems, focusing on techniques that use search based software engineering to guide the test construction process. The talk will also present to Sapienz, automated Android search based software testing.