Reflections by Susie Wee

I've been living in Silicon Valley for the last 12 years, and I was in Boston for 10 years before that, but I spent the first 16 years of my life growing up in a small town in western New York called Batavia. According to Google Maps, it would take me 1 day and 16 hours to drive 2717 miles from my old hometown to my current hometown.

My parents still live in Batavia in the house where I grew up. My bedroom is still in tact with beaten up children's furniture, paint, and wallpaper I chose when I was about 5 years old (pearly white dresser, lime green walls, pastel-colored wallpaper with rainbows and houses).

Batavia is a town of less than 20,000 people located halfway between Buffalo and Rochester.  It is about 30 miles away from Buffalo, and lucky us, it is probably the last town within Lake Erie's snowbelt. In other words, we get all the snow that Buffalo gets without the benefits of living in a big city. But the good thing is that we have awesome chicken wings, those that are known to the rest of the world as Buffalo wings. If you're ever driving on the New York State Thruway between Buffalo and Rochester, make sure to stop by Batavia and hit Pontillo's Pizzeria on Main Street to get some of the best pizza and wings you've ever had. And you can stop by Batavia Downs to bet on a few horse races. But don't drive too far and don't blink, because if you go about 1 or 2 miles away from the Thruway exit in any direction you'll be out of the main part of Batavia and you may be in the middle of a corn field. I kind of think of Batavia as middle America- a small town with a high school, a mall, a Dunkin Donuts, and a few pizza joints.  Batavia's first and only Starbucks just opened a couple months ago.  My mom goes there on Sunday morning with her friends, but they only get coffees, not cappuccinos and lattes.  Overall, Batavia is a modest town with down-to-earth, friendly people and I think it was a great place to grow up.

I lost track of most of my friends from Batavia, but the funniest thing has been happening over the last few months. They are now coming out of the woodwork and we're getting back in touch. How? Batavia is now on Facebook!

I've been an active facebook user for a couple years. Many of my Silicon Valley friends are on Facebook. Lots of people at HP are on Facebook. I can take the credit/blame for getting many people to join. Many of my college friends are on Facebook (I went to a techie college). But I was quite surprised when I first started getting Facebook friend invites from my fellow Batavians.

I now get status updates from my high school and elementary school friends, my brother's friends, my sister's friends, my band friends, my soccer friends, people who I was a babysitter for, and people who I babysat. Most of us seemed to have turned into respectable adults. Some people are generous enough to share family pictures. I can poke them, I can leave a comment for them, or I can just passively watch them. The coolest thing is that I can become friends with them even if I don't have time to talk to them.

I often wonder how long different web sites will be around. I thought Facebook would come and go. But I have to say, now that middle America is getting onto Facebook, it will probably be around to stay.

Welcome to Facebook, Batavia!

One of the neat things about my new job is getting to play with, I mean, work with some cool products. Last week the HP Personal Systems Group (which I'm now in) had a big product launch in Berlin. I was happy when the launch date finally came, because I could finally talk openly about the products that I was playing with- oops!- I mean working with at work.

Before I introduce you to my new toys, let me wander into a little career advice since some readers told me that they missed this during my little blogging drought.

Back when I graduated from grad school and was looking for my first job (12 years ago!), one big thing I realized was that the company that you work for determines the kinds of projects that you can work on. In other words, your company sets the context for your work. This was very important from a research perspective, because your company's strategy determines which research problems are relevant or irrelevant, you should work on problems that relevant to your company, and thus this has a big influence on your research career. This not only applies to research, but is true for any field that you're in: research, engineering, design, business, marketing, sales, etc.

So, my two career tips from this little story are:

• Work on areas that are relevant to your company and your company's strategy!
• Work for a company that provides a context for the type of work that you believe in!

Note that this is related to Tip #10 in my Top 10 Career Tips:

• Align your work with your passions and strengths. Define your career accordingly.

To say this in a more playful way, I have always viewed that your company is your sandbox, and your company's current and future products are the toys in your sandbox, and these toys are the ones you get to play with and build on to do your work.

Okay, enough of the career advice. Let me introduce you to some of the new toys in my sandbox: Touch, Mini, and Slim!  (This is not supposed to be a sales pitch, but I have to say that I love these products, so apologies in advance if it sounds like one.)

Touch is the new HP TouchSmart PC. It's the second generation of the TouchSmart product. Touch has a 22" widescreen with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. All the computer guts are built into the touch monitor, so all you do is plug in power and an ethernet connection. It comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. The first version was bigger and boxier, and this version is much more streamlined and sleek. It's neat to see the evolution of the product as we refine it through improvements in technology (e.g., touch sensor technology, display technology, etc.) and through user testing and feedback. It's a neat new device category that we're driving. So far the blog posts have been fun to read  and I can't wait to learn more from the new users of the product to get a well-rounded perspective. I'm really excited about the emergence and evolution of this category, and it will be neat to get more software developers going on this platform!

Mini is the new HP 2133 Mini-Note PC. It's so cute! (Sorry- I couldn't help myself.) It is less than 3 pounds and it has an 8.9 inch WXGA display. It comes with Linux or Vista. It has a cool aluminum case. When I first saw this model in an internal board meeting many months ago, I was immediately drawn to it. The first thing that came to my head is that this is just about to reach the size where I could put it in my purse and still have a fairly full computing experience (I say "fairly" because of the small display). It was slightly bigger than the purse that I had at the time, but I liked it so much that I was thinking that I would buy a slightly larger one so I could carry it around. This raises an interesting usage question that I'll have to write another post about: women like products that fit into their purse while men like products that fit in their pocket. So I wonder what will become of this new form factor of devices. Don't worry- it's not a women-only device. When we unboxed one in my lab the other day, all the men were equally excited about it and we all drooled equally! This is the product category of the Asus Eee PC and surely more competitors will emerge. An interesting this about this product category are the price points- baseline versions are at the sub-$500 level, which allows this fairly full computing experience to get to quite a few places.

Slim is the new ultra-thin notebook, the VooDoo Envy 133. It's 0.7 inches thick and is just over 3 pounds with a 13.3 inch display. It fully boots into Windows, but it has a quick boot Linux-based OS- another great topic for a future post! The upgraded version has a solid state drive for more money, of course. Unfortunately, I don't have one of these myself yet, but I have seen and touched them and they are pretty cool. My brother has been in the market for a laptop and I told him to hold off until this model came out. Bloggers  are comparing this to the MacAir, which is .76 inches in the center and tapers out on the edges. These thin and light notebooks with full-size displays are very interesting and they change your coffee shop, airplane, and over-the-shoulder carrying experience. I like the thought of tucking this away in my slim bag neatly lined up with a writing notebook and a few folders. Slim looks and feels very crisp and sleek- very much in the VooDoo spirit!

My team's job is to look at next-gen software experiences for these and other HP personal computing products. All I can say is I have a fun sandbox to play in!

It's neat to see these emerging product categories evolving.  I'd love to hear your thoughts on these categories, so here are a few questions:

• What do you think about these product categories (the good, the bad, and the ugly)? 
• How do you think these product categories will evolve?
• How would you like to see these product categories evolve?
• What kinds of experiences would you like to see on these products?

 

I’ve been thinking about how different people use their computers. It occurs to me that there are at least three different ways that people use their computers: as a platform, as an appliance, or as a browser.

Some people use their computer as a platform. They get the computer with some base operating system and a handful of applications. Then, over time they continue to download and buy software to suit their needs and desires. Gamers certainly do this as they download and install new games. Photo and video buffs sometimes do this as they buy the newest multimedia editing software. As new software comes out, they buy or download it and get different uses out of their computers.

Some people use their computer as an appliance. They get the computer with an operating system and a handful of applications. Maybe they add a few more applications soon after original purchase. But once they get it set up, they pretty much use the computer “as is” for the rest of its lifetime. They may do a handful of things such as run a word processor, use email, and browse the web. I’m calling this an appliance because it’s used in the same way again and again after the initial setup.

Some people use their computer primarily as a browser. Think about how much time you spend running applications on your computer (e.g., a word processor) vs. how much time you spend on services through your browser (e.g., in facebook, gmail, and flickr). Those who spend more than 80% of their time in the network are using it as a browser.

How do you use your computer?
What types of people use their computers in these different ways?
Do you agree with this classification?  Is this set of modes complete or are their other major modes of use to add to the list?

I gave a keynote talk to kickstart the Packet Video 2007 Workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland. The audience was great, and the talk seemed to generate lots of discussion during the Q&A and for the remainder for the workshop. Here's a recap.

Abstract 

Mobile & media experiences connect people with each other, with information, and with their environment. Media is increasingly being delivered in packets over networks. This raises a number of questions for today's networks:

• How can we transport media packets?
• How can we adapt media packets for diverse clients?
• How can we protect media packets?

A number of emerging applications will impact future directions for packet networks. We also discuss the following questions:

• What impact do globally distributed, immersive media environments have on media packet delivery systems?
• What role does context play in next-generation mobile media experiences?

We consider these questions from the perspective of a user and the perspective of a packet.

Coupling experience and technology

I began by stressing the importance of coupling experience and technology. Rather than developing technology in a box, it is important to first consider the desired user experience and then develop the technologies that impact it. The most important factor for deciding whether a technology gets transferred to product is not how good the technology is, but rather how it impacts the user experience. I have been passionate about this theme for quite some time, and as time passes my passion for this only grows stronger.

The rest of my talk cycled between the following experiences and technologies.

Mobile & Media Experiences

• Experience #1: Mobile, Diverse, Interactive: Diverse mobile video clients, desktop video, living room video
• Experience #2: Immersive, Conversational, Worldwide: Halo collaboration experience, Panoply immersive gaming experience
• Experience #3: Pervasive, Personalized, Context-aware: Mediascapes context-aware multimedia experience

Packet Technologies

• Packet labeling & metadata
• Transcoding & Processing in the network
• Scalable Streaming
• Secure Scalable Streaming
• Multiple Distortion Measures
• Public & private domains
• Sensing context in the network

The first five technologies were discussed in the context of Experience #1.  The last two were discussed with Experience #2 and #3.

Experience #1: Mobile, Diverse, Interactive

Packet labeling & metadata: The main point is that we live in a distributed networked world where media packets will traverse distributed network elements with multiple owners and administrative domains and be processed by devices and equipment made by different manufacturers. In this highly distributed world, one important thing that we can do is smartly label our packets in hopes that over time the smart network elements along the way will use these labels to improve the overall quality of the user experience. The key design principle is to design packet labels that are 1) specific enough to be useful and 2) general enough to be understood.

Example packet labels and metadata include:

• Importance: Distortion values
• Time requirements: Time stamps
• Content type: Video, audio, text, data
• Scalability: Is it truncatable?
• Media attributes: spatial region, resolution, color; audio channel
• Dropability: Can it be dropped? e.g., Drop video for audio-only session.
• Processibility: Is it transcodable? Can it be processed?
• Security: What are the rights and privacy implications of the media?

The research challenges are designing and standardizing the labels with the design principle above, and then developing algorithms that use these labels for delivering improved mobile media experiences.  These algorithms should be evaluated for their performance gains with respect to the label overhead.

Transcoding & Processing in the network

I discussed the experience of delivering media to and from users over any network and on any device. This motivates the technology of performing transcoding operations in the network. In 3G networks, the streaming, recording, and transcoding capabilities can be performed by the IMS Multimedia Resource Function (MRF), which serves and receives the media packets to and from the handsets. Dynamic transcoding can be used to adapt the video for the target client device (e.g., to lower the resolution) and for the network (e.g., to seamlessly handoff media between 3G and 2.5G networks during a mobile media session).

The research challenge that lies ahead is designing and developing transcoding algorithms in a manner that is computationally efficient so that a single transcoding node (e.g., IMS MRF) can process many streams at once to serve multiple clients at one time.

Scalable Streaming

This brings us to a technology called scalable streaming that makes transcoding much more efficient by leveraging scalable coding methods. In essence, if scalable coding methods are used, then we can form scalable packets that pack scalable data, for example low, medium, and high resolution data, into the packet in a manner that allows it to be transcoded by simply truncating the packet. Furthermore, the scalable media packets can have packet labels that contain image metadata and truncation points that can be used by a scalable packet transcoder. The scalable packet transcoder is quite simple- it performs transcoding by simply reading the packet label and then truncating the packet as needed.

Research opportunities arise if the packet labels contain the distortion value of the particular media packet. If distortion values are included in the label, then they can be used as hints for rate-distortion optimized streaming algorithms and rate-distortion optimized transcoding algorithms to improve the quality of the user experience.

Secure Scalable Streaming

Another desired experience includes serving diverse clients while having end-to-end security. End-to-end security means that the media is protected in a manner that only allows the sender and allowed receivers to access the media, while delivering, storing, and transcoding the media packet over the network in a way that does not require decryption. It turns out that this can be achieved by using the same method as scalable streaming, where scalable packets are formed by leveraging scalable coding, and then coupling the packet formation with the encryption process. Specifically, encryption is applied to the packet in a manner that allows the packet transcoding operation to still occur by simple packet truncation. This can also leverage secure scalable image coding standards such as the newly created JPSEC standard for security of JPEG-2000 imagery.

Secure Scalable Streaming was published in ICASSP 2001 by Susie Wee and John Apostolopoulos.

Multiple Distortion Measures

I then described a new technology area that we are studying called Multiple Distortion Measures (MDM). This begins with the following observation: Consider a set of scalable media packets. Generally speaking, the best ordering of the packets is determined by the profit-to-size ratio (or distortion-to-size ratio, in tech terms, delta d over delta r). Surprisingly, we observed that the best ordering for low resolution display is NOT equal to the best ordering for high resolution display. The question that arises is how different are they?

I showed a graph from our ICASSP 2007 paper that shows the PSNR vs. Rate plot for the low resolution reconstructed image with packets ordered in the low-res optimal order and with packets in the high-res optimal order. It turns out that there are differences in performance of up to 4 dB. The graph aso showed the PSNR vs. Rate plot for the high resolution reconstructed image with packets ordered in the high-res optimal order and the low-res optimal order. It turns out that these can have differences of over 1 dB.

This raised a lot of interest from the crowd. I think we'll have lots of people researching MDMs in the years ahead.

This raises the idea of labeling scalable media packets with multiple distortion measures, specifically, with the distortion value of the packet with respect to the low resolution image, the medium resolution image, and the high resolution image. If the packet contains this information, then streaming algorithms can be developed to optimize the media delivery experience to users with diverse client devices.

Multiple Distortion Measures was published in ICASSP 2007 by Carri Chan, Susie Wee, and John Apostolopoulos.

The Future

The last part of the keynote focussed on experiences #2 and #3 to look at the impact of emerging applications on future packet networks.

Experience #2: Immersive, Conversational, and Worldwide

Delivering immersive, high-quality, worldwide experiences has a number of challenges for today's networks. The main problem is that network intelligence exists, but only in spots. For example:

• QoS exists in spots, but is not guaranteed from beginning to end.
• IPv6 exists in spots, but it is often tunneled over IPv4 and so is not available from beginning to end.
• Significant congestion can occur in peering points between administrative domains, and it is very common for packets to traverse administrative domains many times in a single session.
• Due to the sheer number of IP addressses, packets in countries such as India may go through many network address translations (NATs) before being delivered to the recipient.

Public & private domains

As a result, proprietary networks are being built to deliver guaranteed experiences. HP's Halo immersive collaboration experience is built on a proprietary network for that very reason.

In the long run, the right answer is to build out networks that contain IPv6 and QoS. However, until that occurs, there is likely to be a co-existence of public and proprietary networks.

This raises research opportunities of developing protocols and algorithms that improve media delivery over co-existing public and proprietary networks. This also motivates the need to develop packet labels that contain information that can be used by smarter network elements that understand them. And, this once again raises the design principle of designing the labels so that they are specific enough to be useful but general enough to be widely understood.

Experience #3: Pervasive, Personalized, Context-aware

Finally, I described Mediascapes as an example of pervasive, context-aware multimedia experiences. The main essence of Mediascapes is that it uses sensors to trigger multimedia experiences tied to your physical and personal context.

Sensing context in the network

This raises the question of using sensors to sense your context and getting the sensed context into packets that can be used by different applications and services. In the web world, the sensors may exist as GPS sensors, environmental sensors, or personal sensors. In the operator world the sensors may come through carrier-grade network elements as in IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architectures. For example, IMS context can include location, presence, group lists, and subscriber info.

The key is to have the sensors provide context that is wrapped into packets in a manner that they can be easiliy used by applications and services. This raises the challenge of creating a semantic representation for sensed context. Again, like the packet labels, this must be designed in a manner that is both specific enough to be useful but general enough to be widely understood.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to take a moment to give special thanks to thank John Apostolopoulos, Carri Chan, Steve Froelich, Dave Penkler, Qibin Sun, and Zhishou Zhang for their contributions to various parts of this work!

Final note and questions

The audience was great and the talk seemed to generate lots of discussion throughout the workshop.

This was a fun topic to put together for the keynote and I'd like to develop it further. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on any aspects of this.

What are your thoughts and comments on the life of a packet?
Did you attend the workshop and keynote? If so, what did you think?
I'd like to develop this further. Do you have any suggestions for improvements?

Please feel free to leave a URL with your comments.

Alex Vorbau is a true believer of social technology. He uses social technology in all aspects of his daily life and his career, and he even focussed his work blog on Social Technology Innovation. But, he had a bad experience that made him question his beliefs. Take a look at his blog post on Thoughts on Anonymous Cowards. Alex started a legitimate web business with his wife. Someone out there decided that they didn’t like his business, so much that they decided that they would try to sabotage it. They used the very same social web technologies that Alex develops, but they used it against him, and, they hid behind the anonymity of the internet to do it. This really is an example of social web technology gone bad.

I love how social web technology gives everyone a voice. I love that people can publish information with the click of a button. I love that people can post comments, both positive and negative, about what they read. I love the rich world-wide user-generated information pool that social web technology creates. And, I love that I can contribute to it with my own comments and my own blog posts. But what do we do when people abuse the freedom that social web technology has given them?

The social web world is an amazing self-governed community, self-governed by writers and readers. If I am honest in my posts, I feel I am rewarded by appreciation from blog readers. If I am dishonest in my posts, I feel I will get corrected by the blog community. And, if I admit to and correct my errors, I feel the community will forgive me and allow me to rebuild my credibility. I think blogging teaches you to be open, honest, and thoughtful. While as a blogger I am open about my identity, I actually like the fact that blog readers can post comments anonymously, especially when it helps them be honest about something they feel deeply about and can’t express openly.

But what do you do when anonymity gets abused? What do you do when anonymous cowards attack well-meaning people?

Do we start developing social web technologies that don’t allow anonymity? Do we start developing tools that limit or inhibit information sharing? Do we start developing tools to police the abusers?

I can’t help think about the amount of social web innovation that is lost by attacking and demotivating well-meaning social web users and social web innovators. I wonder if the anonymous cowards realize the impact of what they are doing. What should we do?