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<div class="">This is an announcement of Xu Zhang's Candidacy Exam.</div>
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<div class="">Candidate: Xu Zhang</div>
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<div class="">Date: Tuesday, May 30, 2023</div>
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<div class="">Time: 2 pm CST</div>
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<div class="">Remote Location: <a href="https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/7225047983?pwd=YW1MSkpTL2tPTlIzY1poWVUxK2U0QT09" class="">https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/7225047983?pwd=YW1MSkpTL2tPTlIzY1poWVUxK2U0QT09</a> </div>
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<div class="">Location: JCL 298</div>
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<div class="">Title: User-Centric Optimization for Internet Applications</div>
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<div class="">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.</div>
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<div class="">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.</div>
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<div class="">Advisors: Junchen Jiang</div>
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<div class="">Committee Members: Junchen Jiang, <span class="" style="color:rgb(29,29,29); font-family:Calibri,sans-serif; text-align:justify">Siddhartha Sen, Hui Zhang,</span> and Nick Feamster</div>
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