Audience-retention-rate-aware caching and coded video delivery with asynchronous demands

Most of the current literature on coded caching focus on a static scenario, in which a fixed number of users synchronously place their requests from a content library, and the performance is measured in terms of the latency in satisfying all of these requests. In practice, however, users start watching an online video content asynchronously over time, and often abort watching a video before it is completed. The latter behaviour is captured by the notion of audience retention rate, which measures the portion of a video content watched on average. In order to bring coded caching one step closer to practice, asynchronous user demands are considered in this paper, by allowing user demands to arrive randomly over time, and both the popularity of video files, and the audience retention rates are taken into account. A decentralized partial coded delivery (PCD) scheme is proposed, and two cache allocation schemes are employed; namely homogeneous cache allocation (HoCA) and heterogeneous cache allocation (HeCA), which allocate users’ caches among different chunks of the video files in the library. Numerical results validate that the proposed PCD scheme, either with HoCA or HeCA, outperforms conventional uncoded caching as well as the state-of-the-art decentralized caching schemes, which consider only the file popularities, and are designed for synchronous demand arrivals. An information-theoretical lower bound on the average delivery rate is also presented

Être youtubeur au Québec : étude exploratoire d'un métier en émergence

Ce mémoire de maîtrise a pour but d'explorer le métier de youtubeur, tout en s'intéressant au rapport au travail de ces créateurs. Au fil des années, l'engouement envers la plateforme YouTube a été fulgurant, allant même jusqu'à la mise sur pied d'un programme partenaire, afin de permettre aux créateurs de commencer à être rémunérés pour les vidéos qu'ils mettaient en ligne. Parallèlement, les parcours professionnels sont de plus en plus atypiques et plusieurs jeunes semblent attirés par le travail autonome et même, par l'entrepreneuriat (Pennel, 2013; Noiseux, 2012; Longo et al., 2019). Comme la plateforme YouTube est accessible dans plusieurs pays, des chercheurs de partout dans le monde se sont intéressés à ce médium, surtout sous l'angle de son utilisation et de sa consommation par les individus. Toutefois, peu d'entre eux se sont penchés sur ces travailleurs, d'un point de vue orientation, perspective de carrière et rapport au travail. Pour cette recherche qualitative, une recherche documentaire sur la plateforme YouTube a été menée. Ensuite, douze youtubeurs ont été rencontrés lors d'entrevues individuelles, conduites de façon semi-dirigée. L'analyse de ces données a permis de rédiger une description du travail des youtubeurs, puis de dégager quatre profils types, soit 1) le youtubeur de carrière, 2) de youtubeur à entrepreneur, 3) le youtubeur et ses conciliations et 4) l'aspirant youtubeur. Ces quatre profils types ont pu être comparés en regard des six ethos du travail songés par Mercure et Vultur (2010). Dans la discussion, il sera possible d'affirmer qu'être youtubeur peut représenter une activité professionnalisante, un travail pouvant apporter des revenus aux créateurs. La notion d'indépendance et de dépendance envers le travail sur plateforme sera aussi explicitée. Finalement, des réflexions seront abordées sur le métier de youtubeur, exercé dans le contexte singulier de la pandémie de COVID-19.This master's thesis aims to explore the profession of youtubers, while focusing on the relationship between these creators and their work. Over the years, the popularity of the YouTube platform has been soaring, even going so far as to set up a partner program to allow creators to start earning money for the videos they put online. At the same time, career paths are increasingly atypical and many young people seem attracted to self-employment and even entrepreneurship (Pennel, 2013; Noiseux, 2012; Longo et al., 2019). As the YouTube platform is accessible in several countries, researchers from around the world have been interested in this medium, especially in terms of its use and consumption by individuals. However, few of them have studied these workers from the point of view of guidance sciences, career perspective and relationship to work. For this qualitative research, a literature search on the YouTube platform was conducted. Then, twelve youtubers were met during individual interviews, in a semi-structured manner. The analysis of these data allowed us to write a description of the youtubers' work, and then to identify four typical profiles : 1) the career youtuber, 2) from youtuber to entrepreneur, 3) the youtuber and his conciliations, and 4) the aspiring youtuber. These four typical profiles could be compared against the six work ethos thought by Mercure and Vultur (2010). In the discussion, it will be possible to affirm that being a youtuber can represent a professionalizing activity, a job that can bring income to creators. The notion of independence and dependence towards platform work will also be explored. Finally, reflections will be addressed on the profession of youtuber, exercised in the singular context of the COVID-19 pandemic

Coded caching: Information theoretic bounds and asynchronism

Caching is often used in content delivery networks as a mechanism for reducing network traffic. Recently, the technique of coded caching was introduced whereby coding in the caches and coded transmission signals from the central server were considered. Prior results in this area demonstrate that carefully designing the placement of content in the caches and designing appropriate coded delivery signals from the server allow for a system where the delivery rates can be significantly smaller than conventional schemes. However, matching upper and lower bounds on the transmission rate have not yet been obtained. In the first part of this thesis we derive tighter lower bounds on the coded caching rate than were known previously. We demonstrate that this problem can equivalently be posed as a combinatorial problem of optimally labeling the leaves of a directed tree. Our proposed labeling algorithm allows for significantly improved lower bounds on the coded caching rate. Furthermore, we study certain structural properties of our algorithm that allow us to analytically quantify improvements on the rate lower bound for general values of the problem parameters. This allows us to obtain a multiplicative gap of at most four between the achievable rate and our lower bound. The original formulation of the coded caching problem assumes that the file requests from the users are synchronized, i.e., they arrive at the server at the same time. Several subsequent contributions work under the same assumption. Furthermore, the majority of prior work does not consider a scenario where users have deadlines. In the second part of this thesis we formulate the asynchronous coded caching problem where user requests arrive at different times. Furthermore, the users have specified deadlines. We propose a linear program for obtaining its optimal solution. However, the size of the LP (number of constraints and variables) grows rather quickly with the number of users and cache sizes. To deal with this problem, we explore a dual decomposition based approach for solving the LP under consideration. We demonstrate that the dual function can be evaluated by equivalently solving a number of minimum cost network flow algorithms. Moreover, we consider the asynchronous setting where the file requests are revealed to the server in an online fashion. We propose a novel online algorithm for this problem building on our prior work for the offline setting (where the server knows the request arrival times and deadlines in advance). Our simulation results demonstrate that our proposed online algorithm allows for a natural tradeoff between the feasibility of the schedule and the rate gains of coded caching