Named after Professor A. Nico Habermann, head of the Computer Science Department between 1980 and 1988 and Founding Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, the lecture series enables students to engage with prominent faculty and well-known leaders in the field of computer science.

Lecture Title: The Past, Present and Future of Delivering Multimedia on the Internet

Abstract: We recently celebrated the 50th birthday of the Internet. For the first 20 years, the Internet was primarily used for applications such as remote login and simple file transfers. However, for the last 30 years, multimedia content delivery has been the dominant application on the network. Recent measurements from Cisco estimate that Internet video content transfers of all types make up between 80 to 90 percent of Internet traffic today. The result of being such a dominant application is that Internet video significantly influences the design and deployment of Internet protocols and infrastructure. However, Internet video and the support it requires have not been a static target. Over the last 30 years, video content delivery has evolved from simple point-to-point video file downloads to video-on-demand and video conferencing applications, like Netflix and Skype, that we use today.  As a result, video has been a driving force behind many of the evolutionary changes in the Internet. In this talk, I will examine how video applications and the Internet have evolved hand-in-hand. In addition, I will look at new emerging applications like cloud-gaming, large-scale surveillance networks, and social-live streaming and how they will change the nature of Internet video and impact the future Internet.

Biography:

Srinivasan Seshan is currently the Department Head and the Joseph F. Traub Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Science Department. Dr. Seshan received his Ph.D. in 1995 from the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1995 to 2000, Dr. Seshan was a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Dr. Seshan joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 and has been a full professor there since 2011. Dr. Seshan’s primary interests are in the broad areas of network protocols, mobile computing, and distributed network applications. In the past, he has worked on topics such as transport/routing protocols for wireless networks, large-scale network measurements, RAID system design, performance prediction for Internet transfers, ISP multihoming, new approaches to congestion control, large-scale multiplayer games, and large-scale sensor networks. His current work explores the challenges and opportunities related to new networking architectures, network security and Internet fairness. His web page is at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini.