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Clustering time series is a useful operation in its own right, and an important subroutine in many higher-level data mining analyses, including data editing for classifiers, summarization, and outlier detection. While it has been noted that the general superiority of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) over Euclidean Distance for similarity search diminishes as we consider ever larger datasets, as we shall show, the same is not true for clustering. Thus, clustering time series under DTW remains a computationally challenging task. In this work, we address this lethargy in two ways. We propose a novel pruning strategy that exploits both upper and lower bounds to prune off a large fraction of the expensive distance calculations. This pruning strategy is admissible; giving us provably identical results to the brute force algorithm, but is at least an order of magnitude faster. For datasets where even this level of speedup is inadequate, we show that we can use a simple heuristic to order the unavoidable calculations in a most-useful-first ordering, thus casting the clustering as an anytime algorithm. We demonstrate the utility of our ideas with both single and multidimensional case studies in the domains of astronomy, speech physiology, medicine and entomology.

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As the availability and use of wearables increases, they are becoming a promising platform for context sensing and context analysis. Smartwatches are a particularly interesting platform for this purpose, as they offer salient advantages, such as their proximity to the human body. However, they also have limitations associated with their small form factor, such as processing power and battery life, which makes it difficult to simply transfer smartphone-based context sensing and prediction models to smartwatches. In this paper, we introduce an energy-efficient, generic, integrated framework for continuous context sensing and prediction on smartwatches. Our work extends previous approaches for context sensing and prediction on wrist-mounted wearables that perform predictive analytics outside the device. We offer a generic sensing module and a novel energy-efficient, on-device prediction module that is based on a semantic abstraction approach to convert sensor data into meaningful information objects, similar to human perception of a behavior. Through six evaluations, we analyze the energy efficiency of our framework modules, identify the optimal file structure for data access and demonstrate an increase in accuracy of prediction through our semantic abstraction method. The proposed framework is hardware independent and can serve as a reference model for implementing context sensing and prediction on small wearable devices beyond smartwatches, such as body-mounted cameras.

Abstract-Smartphone platforms and applications (apps) have gained tremendous popularity recently. Due to the novelty of the smartphone platform and tools, and the low barrier to entry for app distribution, apps are prone to errors, which affects user experience and requires frequent bug fixes. An essential step towards correcting this situation is understanding the nature of the bugs and bug-fixing processes associated with smartphone platforms and apps. However, prior empirical bug studies have focused mostly on desktop and server applications. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study on bugs in the Google Android smartphone platform and 24 widely-used open-source Android apps from diverse categories such as communication, tools, and media. Our analysis has three main thrusts. First, we define several metrics to understand the quality of bug reports and analyze the bugfix process, including developer involvement. Second, we show how differences in bug life-cycles can affect the bug-fix process. Third, as Android devices carry significant amounts of securitysensitive information, we perform a study of Android security bugs. We found that, although contributor activity in these projects is generally high, developer involvement decreases in some projects; similarly, while bug-report quality is high, bug triaging is still a problem. Finally, we observe that in Android apps, security bug reports are of higher quality but get fixed slower than non-security bugs. We believe that the findings of our study could potentially benefit both developers and users of Android apps.

A recently introduced primitive for time series data mining, unsupervised shapelets (u-shapelets), has demonstrated significant potential for time series clustering. In contrast to approaches that consider the entire time series to compute pairwise similarities, the u-shapelets technique allows considering only relevant subsequences of time series. Moreover, u-shapelets allow us to bypass the apparent chicken-and-egg paradox of defining relevant with reference to the clustering itself. U-shapelets have several advantages over rival methods. First, they are defined even when the time series are of different lengths; for example, they allow clustering datasets containing a mixture of single heartbeats and multi-beat ECG recordings. Second, u-shapelets mitigate sensitivity to irrelevant data such as noise, spikes, dropouts, etc. Finally, u-shapelets demonstrated ability to provide additional insights into the data. Unfortunately, the state-ofthe-art algorithms for u-shapelets search are intractable and so their advantages have only been demonstrated on tiny datasets. We propose a simple approach to speed up a ushapelet discovery by two orders of magnitude, without any significant loss in clustering quality.

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