Enhancing User Experience by Extracting Application Intelligence from Network Traffic

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) continue to get complaints from users on poor experience for diverse Internet applications ranging from video streaming and gaming to social media and teleconferencing. Identifying and rectifying the root cause of these experience events requires the ISP to know more than just coarse-grained measures like link utilizations and packet losses. Application classification and experience measurement using traditional deep packet inspection (DPI) techniques is starting to fail with the increasing adoption of traffic encryption and is not cost-effective with the explosive growth in traffic rates. This thesis leverages the emerging paradigms of machine learning and programmable networks to design and develop systems that can deliver application-level intelligence to ISPs at scale, cost, and accuracy that has hitherto not been achieved before. This thesis makes four new contributions. Our first contribution develops a novel transformer-based neural network model that classifies applications based on their traffic shape, agnostic to encryption. We show that this approach has over 97% f1-score for diverse application classes such as video streaming and gaming. Our second contribution builds and validates algorithmic and machine learning models to estimate user experience metrics for on-demand and live video streaming applications such as bitrate, resolution, buffer states, and stalls. For our third contribution, we analyse ten popular latency-sensitive online multiplayer games and develop data structures and algorithms to rapidly and accurately detect each game using automatically generated signatures. By combining this with active latency measurement and geolocation analysis of the game servers, we help ISPs determine better routing paths to reduce game latency. Our fourth and final contribution develops a prototype of a self-driving network that autonomously intervenes just-in-time to alleviate the suffering of applications that are being impacted by transient congestion. We design and build a complete system that extracts application-aware network telemetry from programmable switches and dynamically adapts the QoS policies to manage the bottleneck resources in an application-fair manner. We show that it outperforms known queue management techniques in various traffic scenarios. Taken together, our contributions allow ISPs to measure and tune their networks in an application-aware manner to offer their users the best possible experience

Achieving broad access to satellite control research with zero robotics

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2013.This thesis was scanned as part of an electronic thesis pilot project.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-313).Since operations began in 2006, the SPHERES facility, including three satellites aboard the International Space Station (ISS), has demonstrated many future satellite technologies in a true microgravity environment and established a model for developing successful ISS payloads. In 2009, the Zero Robotics program began with the goal of leveraging the resources of SPHERES as a tool for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education through a unique student robotics competition. Since the first iteration with two teams, the program has grown over four years into an international tournament involving more than two thousand student competitors and has given hundreds of students the experience of running experiments on the ISS. Zero Robotics tournaments involve an annually updated challenge motivated by a space theme and designed to match the hardware constraints of the SPHERES facility. The tournament proceeds in several phases of increasing difficulty, including a multi-week collaboration period where geographically separated teams work together through the provided tools to write software for SPHERES. Students initially compete in a virtual, online simulation environment, then transition to hardware for the final live championship round aboard the ISS. Along the way, the online platform ensures compatibility with the satellite hardware and provides feedback in the form of 3D simulation animations. During each competition phase, a continuous scoring system allows competitors to incrementally explore new strategies while striving for a seat in the championship. This thesis will present the design of the Zero Robotics competition and supporting online environment and tools that enable users from around the world to successfully write computer programs for satellites. The central contribution is a framework for building virtual platforms that serve as surrogates for limited availability hardware facilities. The framework includes the elaboration of the core principles behind the design of Zero Robotics along with examples and lessons from the implementation of the competition. The virtual platform concept is further extended with a web-based architecture for writing, compiling, simulating, and analyzing programs for a dynamic robot. A standalone and key enabling component of the architecture is a pattern for building fast, high fidelity, web-based simulations. For control of the robots, an easy to use programming interface for controlling 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) satellites is presented, along with a lightweight supervisory control law to prevent collisions between satellites without user action. This work also contributes a new form of student robotics competition, including the unique features of model-based online simulation, programming, 6DOF dynamics, a multi-week team collaboration phase, and the chance to test satellites aboard the ISS. Scoring during the competition is made possible by possible by a game-agnostic scoring algorithm, which has been demonstrated during a tournament season and improved for responsiveness. Lastly, future directions are suggested for improving the tournament including a detailed initial exploration of creating open-ended Monte Carlo analysis tools.by Jacob G. Katz.Ph.D

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

Advances in Grid Computing

This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. New ideas employing heuristic methods from swarm intelligence or genetic algorithm and quantum encryption are considered in order to explain two main aspects of grid computing: resource management and data management. The book addresses also some aspects of grid computing that regard architecture and development, and includes a diverse range of applications for grid computing, including possible human grid computing system, simulation of the fusion reaction, ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning and complex water systems

Data-Driven Recommender Systems: Sequences of recommendations

This document is about some scalable and reliable methods for recommender systems from a machine learner point of view. In particular it adresses some difficulties from the non stationary case

Explanations and Processes to Enable Humans to Assess AI with Respect to Manipulable Properties

Assessing AI systems is difficult. Humans rely on AI systems in increasing ways, both visible and invisible, meaning a variety of stakeholders need a variety of assessment tools (e.g., a professional auditor, a developer, and an end user all have different needs). We posit that it is possible to provide explanations and assessment processes that enable AI non-experts observing multiple intelligent agents in sequential domains to differentiate the agents with respect to a property (e.g., quality or fairness), as well as articulate justification for their differentiation. Further, we hypothesize that if the property can be manipulated in a highly controllable fashion, then it is possible to measure the quality of an explanation and/or assessment process by its ability to expose that such manipulation has occurred. This dissertation presents our contributions in explanations, processes, and manipulations for assessment. Specifically, we present our investigations into explanations to judge fairness of a classifier, the After-Action Review for AI process to structure explanation consumption, the Ranking task for explanation evaluation, and the Mutant Agent Generation approach for introducing controllable variation. By improving explainability of AI in all these phases, we seek to empower assessors to calibrate trust in the system appropriately

The end of stigma? Understanding the dynamics of legitimisation in the context of TV series consumption

This research contributes to prior work on stigmatisation by looking at stigmatisation and legitimisation as social processes in the context of TV series consumption. Using in-depth interviews, we show that the dynamics of legitimisation are complex and accompanied by the reproduction of existing stigmas and creation of new stigmas

Business Investigation Study For The Nordic Telemedicine Center Using Business Model Canvas and Monte Carlo Simulation

The eHealth industry has caught huge attention during the last decade especially in Nordic countries. The concept of telemedicine is becoming an essential factor in the healthcare sector owing to its advantageous edges that made remote diagnosis and monitoring become more viable. Such role that brought numerous patients’ cases within the reach of healthcare professionals, facilitated the continuous monitoring of their vital signs and kept records of their previous health history for better treatments. However, telemedicine projects –as any other type of projects– should possess a preliminary feasibility plan described in business terms to speculate the likelihood of failure or success based on the resources and the value proposition. Various worldwide approaches have been conducted in many countries to provide the suitable business frames for the telemedicine business model. One of the main objectives of the Nordic telemedicine Center (NTC) project is to establish a running center that operates and sustains itself even after the project period is concluded thus, a feasible business model is required. In this thesis, an approach is designed upon the business model Canvas structure. The proposed canvas is based on the Nordic telemedicine Center project’s resources and objectives. Nevertheless, the output canvas is assigned with a conducted Monte Carlo simulation to obtain some business insights relying on both real and assumed input data.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format