[Colloquium] Xu Zhang Candidacy Exam/May 30, 2023

[Megan Woodward]

This is an announcement of Xu Zhang's Candidacy Exam.
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Candidate: Xu Zhang

Date: Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Time:  2 pm CST

Remote Location:  https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/7225047983?pwd=YW1MSkpTL2tPTlIzY1poWVUxK2U0QT09

Location: JCL 298

Title: User-Centric Optimization for Internet Applications

Abstract: The landscape of Internet applications is changing rapidly, with a sharp increase in application traffic that relies on fast web services and high-resolution videos. Meanwhile, users are becoming less tolerant of poor application quality. To optimize application quality, for decades, the network and system communities have focused on a system-centric approach—avoiding the low performance of a predefined set of system-level performance metrics anywhere and anytime. However, such an approach is unsustainable as it leads to an explosive growth in demands for computing and network resources, posing a significant challenge to scale Internet applications.

In this talk, I will introduce my effort in re-architecting networked systems with a user-centric approach. Our insight is that poor system performance does not necessarily degrade user-perceived quality, because user sensitivity to system performance is heterogeneous across network connections, service content, etc. I will show that such heterogeneity is ubiquitous in many Internet applications and much more significant than previously believed. These findings open new design choices and challenges for future user-centric systems. In particular, I will discuss two research directions of user-centric optimization: user experience-oriented networked systems and scalable user-study platforms for evaluating user-centric designs.

Advisors: Junchen Jiang

Committee Members: Junchen Jiang, Siddhartha Sen and Nick Feamster




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