Chen Wang is an Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate that started her Ph. D. in the 2010/2011 academic year. Her host institution in Portugal is Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, with the orientation of Prof. Ricardo Morla. At CMU, her advisor was Hyong Kim, at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
As she recently graduated, we caught up with her on career path and a look back at her dual degree Ph. D. experience.
CMU Portugal – Firstly, congratulations on your graduation. Can you tell us a bit more about your thesis?
Chen Wang – My thesis is titled “QoE based Management and Control for Large-scale VoD System in the Cloud”. In a quick summary, the Cloud infrastructure has become an ideal platform for large-scale applications, such as Video-on-Demand (VoD). As these types of systems migrate to the Cloud, there are new challenges because the virtualization and resource sharing make it difficult to manage the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). Operational failures in the Cloud can lead to session crashes.
As VoD providers struggle to identify what causes QoE degradation, we proposed to apply end-user QoE in the management and control of large-scale VoD systems in the Cloud. We presented a QoE-based management and control systems and validated them in production Clouds (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Service).
Our research shows that transit networks are the most common bottleneck that causes the QoE anomalies. The cloud providers should identify these bottleneck transit networks and collaborate with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to bypass them.
CMU Portugal – Did your research interests align with your thesis?
Chen Wang – QoE driven system management, Cloud system management, Network management and control, Video analysis and retrieval system, so yes, I got to explored them in my thesis.
CMU Portugal – What is your current professional position?
Chen Wang – I am a research staff member at IBM, in the Thomas J. Watson Research centre, in New York, USA.
CMU Portugal – What would you say are the main aspects of the CMU Portugal Ph. D. dual degrees?
Chen Wang – CMU Portugal Program definitely gives opportunities to collaborate with researchers in both Portugal and US.
CMU Portugal – What would you call your main achievements during your doctorate?
Chen Wang – I’ve had four papers published so far and three are to be submitted. I’ve also given talks at conferences twice.
CMU Portugal – How do you describe your Ph. D. experience and would you recommend this opportunity to other students?
Chen Wang – It was very challenging but really exciting and fulfilling. And definitely yes, I would you recommend it to other students.
October 2017
