Gabelli-Fordham Professor Studies Mobile App Ratings

Work by a professor at Gabelli School of Business-Fordham University could pave the way for a universal ratings system for mobile apps.

Yilu Zhou, an associate professor of information systems at Gabelli, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study ratings for mobile apps, according to a press release from the school.

It’s an issue Zhou is eager to take on.

“Children are the most vulnerable population in the mobile environment,” she said in the Gabelli press release, but “there are not many protections. There’s not enough research, yet children are using mobile phones and computers daily, even more than adults do.”

Zhou’s research will analyze hundreds of thousands of apps and compare ratings between the iOS and Google Play platforms. The research will consider not just the apps themselves, but also in-app advertising.

“Even when an app has an appropriate maturity rating, you might encounter in-app advertisements that are definitely not appropriate for a child user,” she said. “We’ve seen violence, sexual content and nudity.”

Zhou hopes the research leads to policy changes that help protect children.

According to her faculty bio, Zhou joined the Gabelli faculty in 2013, coming to Fordham from George Washington University. She presented a study on app ratings at the International World Wide Web Conference 2013 in Brazil. The previous year, she presented research on “Detecting Offensive Language in Social Media to Protect Adolescent Online Safety” at 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing in Amsterdam. Her other research interests include multilingual knowledge discovery and human-computer interaction.

 

regions: New York City

About the Author