Vaneet Aggarwal, assistant professor of industrial engineering, and Anis Elgabli, PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering, won the Best Paper Award of the 10th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Pervasive Mobile and Online Social Networking (HotPOST 2018), part of the 37th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2018). The award was given on April 16 at the workshop in Honolulu, HI. 

Their paper is titled "GroupCast: Preference-Aware Cooperative Video Streaming with Scalable Video Coding". It proposes a preference-aware cooperative video streaming system for videos encoded using Scalable Video Coding (SVC) where all contributing users are interested in watching the same video on a single screen. The quality decisions of video chunks and fetching policy of the SVC layers subject to the available bandwidth, chunk deadlines, and cooperation willingness of the different users is formulated as an optimization problem and efficient algorithms are proposed. Optimality guarantees and online adaptations are provided, and extensive simulations driven by real SVC encoded video and real bandwidth traces of a public dataset reveal the robustness and high-performance of the proposed scheme.

The 10th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Pervasive Mobile and Online Social Networking (HotPOST) aims to bring together researchers, engineers, and practitioners who work on mobile computing, online social networks, and the intersection of both, to identify the new problems and discuss the latest research ideas and results, especially those related to emerging technologies. HotPOST 2018 focuses on all aspects about mobile and online social networking, including architecture, design, implementation, measurement, modeling, algorithm, and analysis.