Sunday, July 9, 2006 (09:00 - 12:00, Carmichael)
Dr. Jin Li, Microsoft Research, USA
In both the academia and in the industries, peer-to-peer (p2p) applications have attracted great attention. Peer-to-peer file sharing applications, such as Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa and BitTorrent, have witnessed tremendous success among the end users. And the uses of peer-to-peer network for multimedia streaming, conferencing, gaming, file backup, information retrieval are on the rise. Unlike a client-server based system, peers bring with them serving capacity. Therefore, as the demand of a peer-to-peer system grows, the capacity of the network grows too. This enables a peer-to-peer multimedia application to be cheap to build and superb in scalability.
In this short course, we examine a number of issues associated with successfully building and deploying a P2P multimedia application. We start by examining the components of popular P2P applications. We then investigate a number of tools for building P2P multimedia applications, such as the distributed hash table (DHT), erasure coding, and P2P transport (locality awareness, NAT/firewall traversal, and IP multicast). Finally, we move on to critical deployment decisions that may make-or-break a P2P applications, such as P2P economy, reputation and incentives, dealing with malicious attacks, and privacy and security issues.
Jin Li received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) in 1994. From 1994 to 1996, he served as a Research Associate at the University of Southern California (USC). From 1996 to 1999, he was a member of the technical staff at the Sharp Laboratories of America (SLA), (Camas, WA), and represented the interests of SLA in the JPEG2000 and MPEG4 standardization efforts. He was a researcher/project leader at Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China) from 1999 to 2000. He is currently a researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond. From 2000, Dr. Li has also served as an adjunct professor at the electrical engineering department, Tsinghua University (Beijing, China).
Dr. Li has 70+ referred conference and journal papers in a diversified research field, with interests cover audio/image/video compression, virtual environment and graphic compression, audio/video streaming, and realtime audio/video conferencing. His recent interest is in peer-to-peer content delivery applications. Dr. Li has personally built a number of P2P applications, such as P2P web hosting, P2P streaming and P2P distributed storage device. He was the driving force behind Microsoft’s strategy and application development in the peer-to-peer area, and the prototype he built may potentially change the online experience of millions of users. He holds 11 issued US patents, with many more pending. Dr. Li is an Area Editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (Academic Press) and an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. He is a senior member of IEEE. He was the recipient of the 1994 Ph.D. thesis award from Tsinghua University and the 1998 Young Investigator Award from SPIE Visual Communication and Image Processing.