Seminar: Modeling User Concerns in The Mobile App Market

 

  

Anas Mahmoud, Ph.D.

Louisiana State University, Division of Computer Science

September 13, 2019

3 pm

Patrick F. Taylor Hall, Room 3107

Abstract

Over the past decade, mobile applications (apps) have become the fabric of our computing landscape. However, despite their significant positive impacts on our productivity, ability to communicate, and overall quality of life, mobile apps have come with several unwanted side-effects, or concerns, that jeopardized their survival and compromised our experience. A user concern can be defined as any functional or non-functional behavior of the app that might negatively impact its users' experience or their overall wellbeing. These concerns extend over a broad range of personal and societal issues, impacting our mental and physical health, security and privacy, economic status, and overall social structure. Apps that do not adequately address their users' concerns are often deemed untrustworthy, unhelpful, or even abandoned by users.

To address these challenges, we propose a set of automated solutions for detecting, classifying, and indexing user concerns in the mobile app market. We further propose a new type of software models, designed to explicitly describe these concerns along with their relations to user goals and functional app features. Our objective is to provide reusable satisficing solutions for universal app design problems, enabling app developers to adapt optimized release engineering strategies that can maximize their market fitness and minimize the probability of failure. The impacts of the proposed solutions will further extend to the entire population of mobile app users, targeting the unwanted side-effects of mobile technology on the well-being of individuals and societies.

Bio

Nash Mahmoud is an Assistant Professor in the School of EECS at Louisiana State University. His research is in Software Engineering, with emphasis on Requirements Engineering, program comprehension, and static code analysis. Dr. Mahmoud directs SEEL, the Software Engineering and Evolution Laboratory at LSU. His work at SEEL has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Louisiana Board of Regents, and Google.

Dr. Mahmoud received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Mississippi Stated University in 2009 and 2014 respectively. He is a recipient of the distinguished paper award at IEEE RE 2013, 14, and 15 and the LSU College of Engineering Instructor Excellence award in 2017.