The Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering is hosting a talk by Dr Sergey Gorinsky from the IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, Spain.
Date: 7 April 2025, 10:00-11:00
Venue: Room E3076 (Watt Room), Department of E&E Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
(https://maps.app.goo.gl/TsUCEoFKvzDk5PJS9)
Title of Talk: QoE Personalisation and In-Band Quality Notification: How Providers Can Enhance User Experience
Talk Summary
Quality of Experience (QoE) is a critical metric for networked systems, particularly in video streaming. This talk explores individualised QoE (iQoE) and in-band quality notification (IQN) as two distinct approaches to improving QoE by over-the-top (OTT) providers and Internet service providers (ISPs), respectively.
Traditional QoE models often follow a one-size-fits-all approach, failing to account for atypical viewers who perceive QoE differently. To address this, we introduce iQoE, a method that enables viewers to construct personalised QoE models through explicit actionable feedback. A crowdsourced study with 120 subjects and 14,400 individual scores shows that iQoE achieves a 42% average accuracy improvement and 85% for atypical viewers in just 22 minutes of interaction.
At the same time, end-to-end encryption by OTT providers hinders ISPs’ ability to infer and enhance QoE independently. To overcome this, we propose in-band quality notification (IQN), a mechanism that allows end-user devices to signal QoE impairments to ISPs without requiring OTT cooperation. IQN induces distinctive packet patterns in encrypted traffic, enabling ISP-side QoE inference. A prototype system, YouStall, applies IQN to infer YouTube stalls, and cloud-based experiments validate its feasibility in real Internet environments.
Biography of Speaker
Sergey Gorinsky is a tenured Research Associate Professor at the IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, Spain. He joined the Institute in 2009 and leads the NetEcon (Network Economics) research group there. Dr Gorinsky received his PhD and MS degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in 2003 and 1999, respectively and an Engineer degree from Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, Zelenograd, Russia, in 1994. From 2003 to 2009, he served on the tenure-track faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. In 2010-2014, Dr Gorinsky was a Ramón y Cajal Fellow funded by the Spanish Government. His primary research interests include computer networking, distributed systems, and network economics. Dr Gorinsky’s work appeared at top conferences and journals such as SIGCOMM, CoNEXT, INFOCOM, Transactions on Networking, and Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He served as a TPC chair of ICNP 2017 and other conferences and as a TPC member for a broader conference population. Sergey Gorinsky contributed to conference organisation in many roles, such as a general chair of SIGCOMM 2018 and ICNP 2020. He also served as an evaluator of research proposals and projects for the European Research Council, the European Commission, and numerous other funding agencies.
