Polly Huang
Department of Electrical Engineering
National Taiwan University
Taipei, Taiwan
‘User-Centric Multimedia Networking for the Mobile Era - How to Strike
a Balance between User Demand and Scarce Resource’
BIO
Polly Huang is a nerd and a geek by nature. She enjoys observing systems of complexity and loves the process of finding out their true nature. Professionally, She is a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University (NTU EE). Polly received her PhD from USC (CS 1999) and her BS from NTU (Math 1993). Before returning to NTU, she spent the early days of her career at AT&T Labs-Research, ETH Zurich, and UCLA. Polly was also a visiting scientist at CSAIL MIT Fall 2013.
Over the past 20+ years, Polly has random walked a number of projects under the big umbrella of network and system research, including multicast routing, network simulation, Internet measurement, performance modeling, QoS, sensor networking, indoor localisation, delay-tolerant networking, time synchronisation, mobile system, event/activity inference, ubiquitous and wearable computing, e-health, and etc. The experience has nurtured her interest in design, analysis, and applications of communication networks and systems in general. Her recent interest spans the following 3 areas: multimedia networking, sensor networking, and mobile computing.
Polly has (co-)authored over 100 technical articles and over 10 US patents. She has served as a TPC member for a number of high-profile network/system conferences, including ACM Sensys and ACM Sigcomm. She is also an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks and a member of the editorial board of IEEE Journal of Communications and Networks. She is a member of the ACM and IEEE.
ABSTRACT
As the proportion of the multimedia traffic over the Internet through wireless and mobile access rises and the world economy recovers slowly, the issue of streaming Voice/Video content cost-effectively is ever more pressing. The key question to address here is how to satisfy more (paying) users given limited resources. Users switch to other providers/services because they can't hear/see the content well, not because they detect the fine-grained changes in network loss, delay or jitter, so called Quality of Service (QoS). Over the years, the Internet engineers, although getting very good at designing for QoS, have overlooked the fact that users might not perceive the subtle quantitative difference in QoS metrics to the overall user experience.
Towards a user-friendly, therefore economically healthy, mobile Internet, we see the need to measure, understand, and redesign various control mechanisms for quality of user experience (QoE), in addition to the QoS. Using Skype/SILK VoIP service as an example, we show how one (1) measures QoE of calls delivered of different QoS, (2) derives models that translate from QoS to QoE, and (3) exploits the model for a design that pleases the users more under the same resource constraint.
