Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Academic Day 2019 Increasing Productivity Award

Dr Gao Guanyu received the award on behalf of Prof Wen Yonggang and team on stage during MSRA Academic Day 2019.

Professor Wen Yonggang (IEEE Fellow, Associate Dean – Research, College of Engineering, NTU Singapore) and his team, together with their collaborators from Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), have won MSRA Academic Day 2019 Increasing Productivity Award. The award was conferred by MSRA during MSRA Academic Day 2019, which was held from 7-8 Nov 2019 in Beijing, China. 

The awarded project, named “Optimizing Quality of Experience (QoE) for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming via Deep Video Analytics”, was funded by MSRA and was conducted under Prof Wen Yonggang. The objective of the project is to develop an interest-aware rate adaptation mechanism to offer users a higher viewing experiences across heterogeneous viewing devices. The proposed method not only considers the objective QoE metrics for rate adaptation, but also the subjective viewer interest on video content. They implemented a video streaming prototype that can support interest-aware rate adaptation mechanism, and the implementation is one of the first semantic-aware video streaming system that can achieve higher viewing experience. It has the potential to improve the performance of many existing video streaming application, e.g., Microsoft Stream, Office 365 Video, etc.

Introduction of MSRA Academic Day 2019
MSRA is Microsoft’s fundamental research facility in the Asia Pacific region. The lab conducts basic research and collaborates with the world’s top researchers to develop technologies that help solve global challenges. The Academic Day 2019 event brings together the intellectual power of researchers from across Microsoft Research Asia and the academic community to attain a shared understanding of the contemporary ideas and issues facing the field of tech. The Academic Day 2019 facilitates comprehensive and insightful exchanges between Microsoft Research Asia and the academic community.