Subject: [ippm] Help Us with Measurement Research for Human-Centered Networks

From: Renata Teixeira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:30:51 +0100

Dear colleagues,

We need your help to conduct our research and are giving away gift 
certificates! We have designed HostView, a tool that collects network 
performance data along with user feedback of the network. Traces 
collected with HostView will help us understand end-user perception of 
network performance and will guide our research on diagnosing 
performance problems. To thank you for installing HostView, we are 
giving away 50$ Amazon gift certificates to 40 users selected at random 
from the first 100 that run it for a month. You can also ask HostView to 
give you feedback on the health of your network connectivity and 
application bandwidth consumption.

HostView runs on MAC and Linux PCs. If you are not a Linux or MAC user, 
please forward this email to your colleagues and friends! Otherwise, 
please download HostView at: http://cmon.lip6.fr/EMD/Download.html.

Once HostView is running there isn't much for you to do, except one 
thing. HostView includes a "user questionnaire" that should take 1 
minute to fill out. We are interested in knowing how you perceive the 
performance of your machine at various performance points. There are two 
ways to answer this questionnaire: either when it pop ups (at most 3 
times a day) or by hitting the "I am annoyed button" when you are 
unsatisfied with your network performance. More details on how to answer 
the questions is in the user manual that you can grab from the EMD 
project webpage.

To see more about the tool and why we have done this, please see our web 
page at http://cmon.lip6.fr/EMD. A lot has gone into the development of 
HostView. We have tested and selected particular methods for data 
collection and data processing so as to have minimal overhead on your 
machine. A detailed description of HostView is in our Hotmetrics paper 
(http://hotmetrics.cs.caltech.edu/program.shtml).
To address privacy concerns we did a user survey and we designed our 
tool according to majority opinions from this input (e.g., we included a 
pause button). The survey results appeared as a short paper in the April 
2010 issue of CCR. For your privacy, we have also implemented 
state-of-the art anonymization techniques. A description of our 
commitment to your privacy can be found on the project webpage as well.

Your help and participation is enormously appreciated!

Diana Joumblatt, Renata Teixeira
Laboratoire LIP6
CNRS AND UPMC Paris Universitas

Jaideep Chandrashekar, Nina Taft
Intel Labs, Berkeley

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From: Al Morton <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2010 11:35:53 -0500

At 11:30 AM 12/2/2010, Renata Teixeira wrote:
>... HostView runs on MAC and Linux PCs. If you are not ...

I think many people will consider this a strong source of
bias in your opinion data, so remember to address that aspect
in your paper.

good luck with the study,
Al