Events Calendar

Phd Defense - Shuai Hao

Title: Toward Understanding Mobile Apps at Scale

Ph.D Candidate: Shuai Hao

Time: 1:00pm
Date: May 27, 2014
Location: RTH 306

Committee:
Ramesh Govindan (Co-Chair)
William G.J. Halfond (Co-Chair)
Leana Golubchik
Sandeep Gupta (Outside Member)

The mobile app ecosystem has experienced tremendous growth in the last decade. This has triggered active research on dynamic analysis of energy, performance,and security properties of mobile apps. There is, however, a lack of tools that can accelerate and scale these studies to the size of an entire app marketplace. In this dissertation, we present three pieces of work that can help researchers and developers move toward this direction.


First, we present a new approach that can provide fine-grained estimates of mobile app energy consumption. We achieve this by using a novel combination of program analysis and per-instruction energy modeling. Our Android prototype, called eLens, shows that our approach is both accurate and lightweight. We believe that the development of energy efficient mobile apps will be accelerated with eLens.

Then, we introduce a framework, called SIF, for selective app instrumentation. SIF contains two high-level programming abstractions: codepoint sets and path sets. Additionally, SIF also provides users with overhead estimates for specified instrumentation tasks. By implementing a diverse set of tasks, we show that SIF abstractions are compact and precise and its overhead estimates are accurate. We expect the release of SIF can accelerate studies of the mobile app ecosystem.

Last, we focus on programming framework for dynamic analysis of mobile apps. This is motivated by the fact that existing research has largely developed analysis-specific UI automation techniques, where the logic for exploring app execution is intertwined with the logic for analyzing app properties. PUMA is a programmable framework that separates these two concerns. It contains a generic UI-Automation capability and exposes high-level events for which users can define handlers. We demonstrate the capabilities of PUMA by analyzing seven distinct performance, security, and correctness properties over 3,600 marketplace apps.

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 306

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon