Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The current state of mobile handhelds and their future direction all point to the crucial role they will occupy in managing personal data in both physical and social networks. The proposed research program will investigate several aspects of the mobile handhelds' role as the gateway and the personal computer of choice for managing personal data between the user and both the physical and the inter-networked world.We address four challenges in the mobile handheld device's role as the gateway between the user and theInternet: detecting and preventing leakage of private personal information in social networks, peer-to-peer data provenance tracking, power-aware data synchronization between mobile device and cloud, and onlinepower consumption monitoring of mobile applications. The solutions to these problems will provide the user a fundamentally superior smart mobile experience. The mobile user will be able to enjoy active participation in various social networks without worrying about privacy leakage. She can create, contribute and consume multimedia data whose provenance and authenticity can be traced in a trustworthy way. Her mobile device will also seamlessly and intelligently perform data synchronization with the cloud central storage, so that she will not be limited by the local storage space in using her applications. Moreover, all this is supported by an online power monitoring tool that helps to optimize power usage and maximize battery life. This research will not only improve smart phone usage for individuals in Canada and around the world, but will also have implications in the ways that businesses and industry apply the technology associated with improved mobile hand-held devices to their business model.