Sagar Joglekar

An Innovative System for Remote and Automated Testing of Mobile Phone Applications

Application testing is an integral part of the application life cycle. This testing effort is more for the 3rd party applications in the mobile phone market, due to the wide number of handsets available on which the application needs to be tested before being released. At the same time, majority of the applications use the cellular network, necessitating the tester1 (along with the handset) to be present in the service area of the cellular network. We present a remote testing system, wherein the handset is in the cellular network service area, but the tester is present in a remote location. The tester controls the handset over the Internet. This gives opportunities to leverage the potential of the global outsourcing business model in mobile application testing domain. In addition, the system is agnostic to the Operating System & application running on the mobile phone, and is also non-intrusive. Further, we present preliminary results on automating this remote testing process itself.

Transcoding resistant robust watermarking technique using entropy-based selective spread spectrum

The growth of the internet makes it easier for data owners to transfer digital multimedia content over the internet. This provides an environment where hackers can easily scoop the content and illegally redistribute it which increases the need for efficient copyright protection mechanisms like digital watermarking. The future internet will have various heterogeneous devices like laptop, mobile and IPTV which require the data to be transcoded according to the end user devices. But the process of transcoding affects the embedded watermark making it difficult to prove the ownership rights. The current scenario is to embed the watermark in the content after it has been transcoded which requires watermarking the same content after each transcoding. This paper investigates the effects of transcoding on watermark and recommends a robust watermarking algorithm such that watermark can be embedded in the original content once and can be retrieved even after the content is transcoded.

Like at First Sight: Understanding User Engagement with the World of Microvideos

Several content-driven platforms have adopted the ‘micro video’ format, a new form of short video that is constrained in duration, typically at most 5–10 s long. Micro videos are typically viewed through mobile apps, and are presented to viewers as a long list of videos that can be scrolled through. How should micro video creators capture viewers’ attention in the short attention span? Does quality of content matter? Or do social effects predominate, giving content from users with large numbers of followers a greater chance of becoming popular? To the extent that quality matters, what aspect of the video – aesthetics or affect – is critical to ensuring user engagement?

Robust transcoding resistant watermarking for H.264 standard

Content in the digital form can be easily copied and distributed without permission of the owner. As a result, it is of paramount importance to protect content and deter illegal distribution using content protection mechanisms like embedding an imperceptible watermark into the content. Given that consumers want access to content from anywhere using any device, it is necessary to transcode content keeping in mind the limitations of the devices in terms of processing power and network connectivity. However, it is important that the watermark embedded in the content is preserved even after transcoding. The proposed approach embeds in a video, an imperceptible yet robust watermark which is resistant to transcoding. This approach focuses on the H.264 codec because of its widespread use in the industry.

Addendum to the Acknowledgements: How Online Communities of People With Long-Term Conditions Function and Evolve: Network Analysis of the Structure and Dynamics of the Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation Online Communities

Sagar Joglekar, MS; Nishanth Sastry, PhD; Neil S Coulson, PhD; Stephanie JC Taylor, MD; Anita Patel, PhD; Robbie Duschinsky, PhD; Amrutha Anand, MPH; Matt Jameson Evans, MB BS; Chris J Griffiths, D Phil; Aziz Sheikh, MD; Pietro Panzarasa, PhD; Anna De Simoni, PhD 1Department of Informatics, Kings College London, London, United Kingdom 2School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom 3Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research, Barts Institute of Population Health Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom 4Primary Care Unit, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom 5HealthUnlocked, London, United Kingdom 6Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research, Usher Institute of Population Sciences and Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom 7School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

How Online Communities of People With Long-Term Conditions Function and Evolve: Network Analysis of the Structure and Dynamics of the Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation Online Communities

Background Self-management support can improve health and reduce health care utilization by people with long-term conditions. Online communities for people with long-term conditions have the potential to influence health, usage of health care resources, and facilitate illness self-management. Only recently, however, has evidence been reported on how such communities function and evolve, and how they support self-management of long-term conditions in practice. Objective The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying online self-management support systems by analyzing the structure and dynamics of the networks connecting users who write posts over time. Methods We conducted a longitudinal network analysis of anonymized data from 2 patients’ online communities from the United Kingdom: the Asthma UK and the British Lung Foundation (BLF) communities in 2006-2016 and 2012-2016, respectively. Results The number of users and activity grew steadily over time, reaching 3345 users and 32,780 posts in the Asthma UK community, and 19,837 users and 875,151 posts in the BLF community. People who wrote posts in the Asthma UK forum tended to write at an interval of 1-20 days and six months, while those in the BLF community wrote at an interval of two days. In both communities, most pairs of users could reach one another either directly or indirectly through other users. Those who wrote a disproportionally large number of posts (the superusers) represented 1% of the overall population of both Asthma UK and BLF communities and accounted for 32% and 49% of the posts, respectively. Sensitivity analysis showed that the removal of superusers would cause the communities to collapse. Thus, interactions were held together by very few superusers, who posted frequently and regularly, 65% of them at least every 1.7 days in the BLF community and 70% every 3.1 days in the Asthma UK community. Their posting activity indirectly facilitated tie formation between other users. Superusers were a constantly available resource, with a mean of 80 and 20 superusers active at any one time in the BLF and Asthma UK communities, respectively. Over time, the more active users became, the more likely they were to reply to other users’ posts rather than to write new ones, shifting from a help-seeking to a help-giving role. This might suggest that superusers were more likely to provide than to seek advice. Conclusions In this study, we uncover key structural properties related to the way users interact and sustain online health communities. Superusers’ engagement plays a fundamental sustaining role and deserves research attention. Further studies are needed to explore network determinants of the effectiveness of online engagement concerning health-related outcomes. In resource-constrained health care systems, scaling up online communities may offer a potentially accessible, wide-reaching and cost-effective intervention facilitating greater levels of self-management.

A novel way of tracking people in an indoor area

Tracking people in an indoor area is a technically challenging problem, and has many interesting applications. One of the scenarios being, tracking customers in a big shopping mall. This real time location information can be used for a variety of needs. In this paper we present a novel way of achieving this by matching people based on the image of the lower part of their body (pant/leg and shoes). Our approach is novel in 2 ways: there are no per-customer costs i.e. nothing needs to be changed at the customer side. Also, as we use the image of lower part of the body, there should be potentially no privacy related issues, unlike face recognition.