CS SEMINAR

Beyond Google Play: Understanding the Universal Mobile App Ecosystem

Speaker
Professor Yao Guo
Peking University

Chaired by
Dr LIANG Zhenkai, Associate Professor, School of Computing
liangzk@comp.nus.edu.sg

10 Aug 2018 Friday, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

MR1, COM1-03-19

Abstract:

The number of mobile apps have kept increasing at an extraordinary speed, resulting in a complicated mobile app ecosystem involving different stakeholders including app markets, developers and end users. From a worldwide perspective, the universal mobile app ecosystem is far beyond Google Play, as there are potentially hundreds of third-party mobile markets providing services from different countries. What is the potential impact of these app markets to the universal mobile app ecosystem? In this work, I will talk about the first large-scale comparative study that covers more than 6 million Android apps downloaded from 16 Chinese app markets and Google Play. We focus our study on catalog similarity across app stores, their features, publishing dynamics, developer trends, and the prevalence of various forms of misbehavior-including the presence of fake, clone and malicious apps. I will also briefly give an overview of our recent work on mobile ad fraud detection and fine-grained privacy protection techniques for mobile apps.


Biodata:

Yao Guo is a professor and vice chair of computer science at the School of EECS, Peking University. His recent research interests mainly focus on mobile app analysis, as well as privacy and security of mobile systems. He has received multiple awards for his research work and teaching, including an Honorable Mention Award from UbiComp 2016, as well as a Teaching Excellence Award from Peking University. He received his PhD degree in computer engineering from University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2007, and BS/MS degrees in computer science from Peking University.