Titulo Estágio
Improving Smartphone Energy Consumption the Crowdsourced Way
Áreas de especialidade
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
It is really difficult to describe the gigantic growth of mobile device usage that we observe these days. This, of course, leads the smartphone application market to follow up. On the Android share alone, and by May 2016, the Google Play store had already received more than 65 billion downloads.
Many smartphone applications make use of modern features to provide immersive experiences. For instance, by location sensing Google Maps can detour drivers to avoid traffic jams or accidents. However, these kind of operations are often energy costly.
Indeed, smartphones in general, and Android smartphones in particular, are getting increasingly more powerful, resulting on a steady and documented increase in the energy consumption of the devices. However, there has not been a significant major breakthrough in battery capacity for years.
As such, energy efficiency is one of most critical concerns for smartphone users. Inappropriate battery use can be a reason for users to uninstall applications, or give negative feedback on them.
Locating energy problems in Android applications is difficult and reproducing these energy problems is labor-intensive. Developers have to continuously and extensively test their applications on different environments using various devices, conducting detailed energy profiling in order to know how much their application use the devices hardware components, such as the CPU to figure out the root causing the energy anomalies.
These methods can quickly become cumbersome and typically time-consuming and most importantly, the results obtained not always reflect the usage of the single application that the developers want to profile, but rather the usage of the whole device.
After taking this into consideration, it seems important to address these challenges, and this has lead to a research initiative, that the interested reader may know more about here:
https://greenhubproject.org/
This is an effort whose insight is to gather (energy-related) inputs from a large collaborative community. This is achieved by creating a comprehensive platform to gather (strictly energy-related) data from the devices used by the members in this (always open) community.
The way to give back to the community is to afterwards make all the collected data publicly available. This is expected to enhance further research on the topic of Android energy analysis and optimization.
Objetivo
The interested candidate will join the previously mentioned research initiative, and will be focused on exploring the data that is gathered by the public platform, and that to this day already encompasses a dataset that surpasses 5 million data samples.
The goal is to conduct large scale mining of such data to establish patterns that can be considered good/bad in terms of energy consumption.
These patterns are expected to provide smartphone users insights and feedback on how to increase their battery duration without changing too much their usage pattern.
The main goals to achieve within this project are:
- to study and critically analyse the state of the art in mining large data repositories;
- to devise and implement a framework for identifying a series of patterns that reflect the usage of Android smartphones;
- to propose a catalogue of such patterns;
- to provide strategies for improving Android usage patterns in terms of reducing energy consumption.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
- Trimester 1: Study the literature, the tools and the frameworks that are available for mining large data repositories.
- Trimester 2: Design a framework for identifying a series of patterns that reflect the usage of Android smartphones;
- Trimesters 1 and 2: Write an intermediate report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
- Trimester 3: Implement the designed framework; propose a catalogue of An- droid energy-usage patterns;
- Trimester 4: Extensively analyse the catalogue to provide strategies for improving Android usage patterns in terms of reducing energy consumption. Thesis writing.
Condições
The eligible student will have at disposal all the necessary computational platforms, tools and devices, including the use of Android devices, if agreed necessary.
He/she will work within a research team that is working on related issues and within a research project funded by FCT.
In the second semester of the internship the student will be developing his/her work at full-time. During 5 months of this period, he/she will benefit from a research grant (FCT BI for Licenciado, see below).
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O aluno irá receber um subsídio de manutenção mensal de acordo com a tabela da FCT para Bolsas de Iniciação Científica, pago por transferência bancária. A atribuição da bolsa não gera nem titula uma relação de natureza jurídico-laboral, é exercida em regime de dedicação exclusiva e atribuído ao Bolseiro o Estatuto de Bolseiro da UC conforme disposto no Regulamento de Bolsas de Investigação da Universidade de Coimbra (Despacho n.º 5120/2005 (2.ª), DR. n.º 48, de 9 de Março, Deliberação n.º 23/2005, de 5 de Janeiro do senado da Universidade Coimbra).
Orientador
João Paulo Fernandes, Bruno Cabral (jpf@dei.uc.pt,bcabral@dei.uc.pt)
jpf@dei.uc.pt 📩