CSU HAYWARD
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND
COMPUTER SCIENCE
COLLOQUIUM
Friday, February 7, 2003; Noon-1:00pm Sc N112
Speaker:
Amy Csizmar Dalal, Post-doctoral Researcher, HP Labs
Candidate for Faculty Position in Computer Science
Client-side Streaming Media Quality Assessment
Streaming media - whether it's a Shoutcast radio stream, a movie trailer, or sports highlights from ESPN.com - increasingly pervades the time we spend online. Yet we understand surprisingly little about how media streams behave and are affected by congestion on the Internet. In particular, we don't know how to tell what the user's experience of a media stream is, without asking the user directly.
In this talk, I will discuss the problem of assessing the quality of media streams from the client's perspective. First, I will outline existing assessment methods and describe where they succeed and where they fail. I will then describe a new approach to assessing streaming media quality that uses existing media servers and players and does not require the user to actively participate. As part of this approach, I have designed and implemented a tool to measure the client's experience of a media stream; I will describe this tool and how it works. Finally, I will present some results obtained from this tool on actual media streams in a network testbed that I implemented.
Please join us beforehand for Pizza!!!!