HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) – Quo Vadis? 

Date/Time: Thursday, Apr 20, 2023, 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada), CET Time 7:00 PM Austria

Join Zoom Meeting: https://SDSU.zoom.us/j/87559833124

Meeting ID: 875 5983 3124

Professor Christian Timmerer

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU), Austria

Abstract: Video traffic on the Internet is constantly growing; networked multimedia applications consume a predominant share of the available Internet bandwidth. A major technical breakthrough and enabler in multimedia systems research and of industrial networked multimedia services certainly was the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technique. This resulted in the standardization of MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) which, together with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), is widely used for multimedia delivery in today’s networks. Existing challenges in multimedia systems research deal with the trade-off between (i) the ever-increasing content complexity, (ii) various requirements with respect to time (most importantly, latency), and (iii) quality of experience (QoE). Optimizing towards one aspect usually negatively impacts at least one of the other two aspects if not both. This situation sets the stage for our research work in the ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory (Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services; https://athena.itec.aau.at/), jointly funded by public sources and industry. In this talk, we will present selected novel approaches and research results of the first year of the ATHENA CD Lab’s operation. We will highlight HAS-related research on (i) multimedia content provisioning (machine learning for video encoding); (ii) multimedia content delivery (support of edge processing and virtualized network functions for video networking); (iii) multimedia content consumption and end-to-end aspects (player-triggered segment retransmissions to improve video playout quality); and (iv) novel QoE investigations (adaptive point cloud streaming). We will also put the work into the context of international multimedia systems research.

Biography: Christian Timmerer is a full professor of computer science at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AAU), Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) and he is the director of the Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory ATHENA (https://athena.itec.aau.at/). His research interests include multimedia systems, immersive multimedia communication, streaming, adaptation, and quality of experience where he co-authored seven patents and more than 300 articles. He was the general chair of WIAMIS 2008, QoMEX 2013, MMSys 2016, and PV 2018 and has participated in several EC-funded projects, notably DANAE, ENTHRONE, P2P-Next, ALICANTE, SocialSensor, COST IC1003 QUALINET, ICoSOLE, and SPIRIT. He also participated in ISO/MPEG work for several years, notably in the area of MPEG-21, MPEG-M, MPEG-V, and MPEG-DASH where he also served as standard editor. In 2012 he cofounded Bitmovin (http://www.bitmovin.com/) to provide professional services around MPEG-DASH where he holds the position of the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) –- Head of Research and Standardization. Further information at http://timmerer.com.

World-Wide Camera Networks

Date/Time: Tuesday, May 2, 2023; 05:00 PM Eastern Time; 02:00 PM
Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Meeting ID: 841 0592 2217

Professor Yung-Hsiang Lu

The Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Purdue University

Abstract: More than 80% consumer Internet traffic is for videos and most of them are recorded videos. Meanwhile, many organizations (such as national parks, vacation resorts, departments of transportation)
provide real-time visual data (images or videos). These videos allow Internet users to observe events remotely. This speech explains how to discover real-time visual data on the Internet. The discovery process uses a crawler to reach many web pages. The information on these web pages are analyzed to identify candidates of real-time data. The data is downloaded multiple times over an extended time period; changes are detected to determine whether it is likely to provide real-time data. The data can be used during an emergency. For example, viewers may check whether a street is flooded and cannot pass. It is also possible using the data to observe long-term trends, such as how people react to movement restrictions during the COVID pandemic.

Biography: Yung-Hsiang Lu is a professor at the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Purdue University. He is a fellow of the IEEE (2021), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2013), and ACM Distinguished Speaker (2013). In 2015-2019, he was a co-founder and adviser of a technology startup that received SBIR-1 and SBIR-2 (Small Business Innovation Research). In 2020-2022, he was the director of the John Martinson Engineering Entrepreneurial Center at Purdue University. His research topics include efficient computer vision for embedded systems, cloud and mobile computing. He leads a research project analyzing real-time video streams from thousands of network cameras. He is the lead organizer of the IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge since 2015. He has published two books: Intermediate C Programming (ISBN 9781498711630) and Low-Power Computer Vision: Improve the Efficiency of Artificial Intelligence (editor, ISBN 9780367744700).

Metaverse Virtual Service Management: Game Theoretic Approaches

US Pacific time: Tuesday Oct 25, 2022 at 6pm, US Eastern time at 9pm
Singapore Time: Wednesday Oct 26, 2022 at 9am

Join Zoom Meeting: https://SDSU.zoom.us/j/81942654288?pwd=RklEWDNxOUE3R2o1RU1PUmZLK3RmQT09

Meeting ID: 819 4265 4288
Passcode: 6682

Professor Dusit Niyato

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Abstract: Metaverse is the next-generation Internet after the web and the mobile network revolutions, in which humans (acting as digital avatars) can interact with other people and software applications in a three-dimensional (3D) virtual world. In this presentation, we first briefly introduce major concepts of Metaverse and the virtual service management. Then, we discuss applications of game theory in the virtual service management. First, we consider that virtual reality (VR) users in the wireless edge-empowered Metaverse can immerse themselves in the virtual through the access of VR services offered by different providers. The VR service providers (SPs) have to optimize the VR service delivery efficiently and economically given their limited communication and computation resources. An incentive mechanism can be thus applied as an effective tool for managing VR services between providers and users. Therefore, we propose a learning-based incentive mechanism framework for VR services in the Metaverse. Second, we consider virtual services provided through the digital twin, i.e., a digital replication of real-world entities in the Metaverse. The real-world data collected by IoT devices and sensors are key for synchronizing the two worlds. A group of IoT devices are employed by the Metaverse platform to collect such data on behalf of virtual service providers (VSPs). Device owners, who are self-interested, dynamically select a VSP to maximize rewards. We adopt hybrid evolutionary dynamics, in which heterogeneous device owner populations can employ different revision protocols to update their strategies. To this end, we discuss some important research directions in Metaverse virtual service management.

Biography: Dusit Niyato is currently a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received B.E. from King Mongkuk’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), Thailand in 1999 and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Manitoba, Canada in 2008. Dusit‘s research interests are in the areas of distributed collaborative machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), edge intelligent metaverse, mobile and distributed computing, and wireless networks. Dusit won the Best Young Researcher Award of IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Asia Pacific and the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award and the IEEE Computer Society Middle Career Researcher Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing in 2021 and Distinguished Technical Achievement Recognition Award of IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing 2022. Dusit also won a number of best paper awards including IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), IEEE ComSoc Communication Systems Integration and Modelling Technical Committee and IEEE ComSoc Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Technical Committee 2021. Currently, Dusit is serving as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, an area editor of IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, associate editor of IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Wireless Communications, IEEE Network, and ACM Computing Surveys. He was a guest editor of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas on Communications. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society for 2016-2017. He was named the 2017-2021 highly cited researcher in computer science. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of IET.