****************************************************************************
Call for Papers
International Workshop on Delay-Sensitive Video Computing in the Cloud

In conjunction with IEEE CloudCom 2015
November 30 - December 3 2015, Vancouver, Canada
https://sites.google.com/site/dsvcc15/
****************************************************************************

Video applications are now among the most widely used and a daily fact of life for the great majority of Internet users. In 2013, video data accounted for 78% of all Internet traffic in the USA and 66% of all Internet traffic in the world, which by 2018 will grow to 84% in the USA and 79% in the world. While presentational video services such as those provided by YouTube and NetFlix dominate this video data, conversational video services such as video conferencing, video gaming, telepresence, tele-learning, collaborative shared environments, and screencasting also have significant usage. With the advent of both mobile networks and cloud computing, we are seeing a paradigm shift, where the computationally-intensive components of these conversational video services are moving to the cloud, and the end user’s mobile device is used as an interface to access the service. By doing so, even mobile devices without high-end graphical and computational capabilities can access a high fidelity application with high end graphics, because all the processing and rendering is done in the cloud, and the result is sent to the user via video, which any mobile device today can display. What distinguishes these cloud-based conversational video systems from all other video systems is the fact that they are highly delay sensitive. While buffering and interruptions of even a few seconds are tolerated by users in presentational video applications, conversational video applications require a much tighter end-to-end delay, usually in the range of 150 to 250 milliseconds. Otherwise the conversational applications will “fail” since it is not responding to user interactions fast enough. The fact that the cloud is used as a central node potentially adds a bottleneck and possibly further delays, leading to a number of challenges, described below.


TOPICS OF INTEREST:
===================
When running conversational video applications in the cloud, the cloud not only processes the application logic, but also the video rendering. The resulting video is then streamed to clients as video. The advantage is that as long as the client can display video, which pretty much all smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and other mobile devices today do, the user can use the application without needing high-end processing or high fidelity/3D graphics rendering hardware and software. But, there are challenges: First, video requires high bandwidth, especially if the scene must be sent to multiple users, such as video conferencing, cloud gaming, and tele-presence. For example, OnLive cloud gaming requires a wired network connection with no less than 5Mbps constant bandwidth per player to provide interactive gaming services with a resolution of 720p at 30fps. Second, conversational video is sensitive to network latencies which impair the interactive experience of the application. Third, the mobility of today’s user poses another set of challenges. Due to the heterogeneity of end user’s devices, the cloud has to adapt the video content to the characteristics and limitations of the client’s underlying network or end device. These include limitations in the available network bandwidth, or limitations in the client device’s processing power, memory, display size, battery life, or the user’s download limits as per his/her mobile subscription plan. In this workshop, we seek original papers that propose new approaches, methods, systems, and solutions that overcome the above shortcomings. Specifically, we seek papers in the following and similar topics:

• Methods to speed up video encoding and video streaming at the cloud side
• Methods to decrease video bandwidth while maintaining visual quality
• Energy-efficient cloud computing for video rendering at the server side
• Efficient capturing, processing, and streaming of user interactions to the cloud, such as traditional, Kinect-like, Wii-like, gesture, touch, and similar mobile and touch-based user interactions
• Virtualization of large volume user inputs (e.g., depth sensor video) in the cloud
• Remote desktop, screen sharing, and Game as a Service (GaaS)
• Video-based telepresence, collaborative shared environments, and cloud gaming
• Optimizing cloud infrastructure and server distribution to efficiently support globally distributed and interacting users
• Resource allocation and load balancing in the cloud for optimized application support
• Network routing, software defined networking (SDN), virtualization, and on-demand dynamic control of the cloud infrastructure
• Adaptive video streaming according to network/user’s limitations
• Quality of Experience (QoE) studies and improvements for delay-sensitive video computing in the cloud: user-cloud and user-user interactions, effects of delay and visual quality limitations, and methods to improve them
• Novel architectures and designs based on cloud video rendering for video conferencing, video gaming, telepresence, tele-learning, collaborative shared environments, screencasting, and other conversational video applications and systems.


SUBMISSIONS:
============
Paper submissions should be at most 6 pages long and must cover one of the above or similar topics. We especially encourage experience papers describing lessons learned from built systems, including working approaches, unexpected results, common abstractions, and metrics for evaluating and improving video systems. Please see IEEE CloudCom guidelines for further formatting and submission instructions.

IMPORTANT DATES:
=================
Submission Deadline: August 1, 2015
Notification of Decision: September 1, 2015
Camera Ready: September 15, 2015

PROGRAM CHAIRS:
===============
Shervin Shirmohammadi (shervin@discover.uottawa.ca), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Maha Abdallah (Maha.Abdallah@lip6.fr), Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC), Paris, France
Dewan Tanvir Ahmed (dahmed@uncc.edu), University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, USA
Kuan-Ta Chen (swc@iis.sinica.edu.tw), Academia Sinica, Taiwan