News

Chris Chambers, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science (CS) at PSU’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science, won the Best Student Paper award at the Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), held October 19-21, 2005. This year’s conference was originally scheduled for New Orleans, LA, but was moved to Berkeley, CA, following Hurricane Katrina.

Chris’s paper, entitled “Measurement-based Characterization of a Collection of On-line Games,” was co-authored by CS Professor Wu-chang Feng, PSU; and Sambit Sahu and Debanjan Saha, IBM Research. The paper looked at issues in designing infrastructure for supporting on-line games. Having access to years of usage data for on-line games and game players, Chris looked at characterizing gamer habits: when they play, how tolerant they are of bad service, how long they play, and how that changes over their lifetime with the game. He also studied what the workload is like on a game server from hour to hour, and week to week. Some interesting conclusions were that gamers do have predictable attention spans, that the load on game servers is predictable over short time intervals, and, not surprisingly, that gamers are very impatient with bad service.

The IMC is a premier conference in Internet Measurement and this year included student papers from Princeton University; Cornell University; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Cambridge; University of Michigan; New York University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; University of Massachusetts Amherst; University of Wisconsin; University of California, Santa Barbara; and University of Maryland.

For more information, please see the abstract for the winning paper or visit Chris Chambers’s Web site: