VU professor gets award for video streaming idea
A Vanderbilt professor has received federal funding to encourage his idea of a peer-to-peer video streaming network that could prove more efficient than the widely popular YouTube.
Yi Cui, an assistant professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, will receive $400,000 over five years from the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The award is in recognition for his research into peer-to-peer networking.
His goal is to enable smaller Internet streaming video services to succeed without the large amounts of money required to maintain powerful servers.
“I’m trying to reach out to the general public,” Cui said. “I enable you to see things you could not see otherwise.”
Where YouTube and other multimedia Internet streaming services rely on central servers, Cui’s system would borrow bandwidth from individual users or “peers,” potentially making the process faster and more efficient.
Cui doubts his new technology will challenge YouTube as the leading provider in Internet streaming video. “YouTube is about entertaining,” Cui said.
“My current reason for developing my technology is so it will be applicable for entrepreneurs that have something interesting to show people.”
