Giuseppe Samela

Software Engineer · giuse-remove-ppe.samela@gmail.com

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Education

Polytech Nice Sophia

Master's Degree in Computer Science
2nd Year International Master UBINET: Ubiquitous Networking and Computing
MASTER THESIS: Virtual Reality - Impact of Content and Transmission Strategies on Network Resources
2016 - 2017

Politecnico di Bari

Master's Degree in Computer Engineering
Double Degree program: Internet Engineering
FINAL MARK: 110/110 e lode (Full marks with honors)
2014 - 2017

Politecnico di Bari

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
THESIS: Malfunction Detection in Susceptibility Tests on Power Electronic Equipment
FINAL MARK: 106/110
2008 - 2014

Experience

Software Engineer

Bitmovin

Bitmovin is a leader in video infrastructure for adaptive streaming. It powers the world’s largest OTT video providers with its Encoding, Player and Analytics products. Here’s how I currently help out:

  • I am part of the Player Team and I work on the Web SDK
  • I contribute by investigating / debugging / fixing bugs in the player code
  • I contribute by introducing new features / writing player tests / improving on the existing code

January 2021 - Present

Software Engineer

Quavlive

Quavlive conducts industrial research activities aimed at the design and development of new and innovative video streaming techniques and services for the web including On-Demand, Live streaming, and video-conferencing. Here are some of my main contributions as a front-end developer and more:

  • Had a leading role in the transitioning of the QuavStreams video portal to the Angular framework
  • Re-designed the company’s website from scratch
  • Was responsible for anything related to iOS/macOS in our video solutions
  • Was heavily involved in the writing of two relevant European project proposals
  • Made several improvements to the WebRTC-based video conferencing system (client-side)

July 2018 - January 2021

Researcher

Politecnico di Bari

After winning a Post-Lauream scholarship, I joined a project called ‘CLIPS - a Cloud based pLatform for Immersive adaPtive video Streaming’, aimed at creating an innovative platform for distributing immersive video content (360°) in the web. Here are some of the main activities I was involved in:

  • Co-authored a paper showcasing an innovative 360-degree video streaming approach involving video rescaling and multi-view automatic video switching
  • Defined a custom encoding format for panoramic videos, and a presentation format for the video content (in compliance with MPEG-DASH, and HLS standards)
  • Implemented the aforementioned 360-degree video platform (in particular the Encoder and the Player)
  • Extended the Google video streaming framework ShakaPlayer (that is used inside the Player) to introduce arbitrary buffer depletion
  • Attended the international ACM Multimedia Systems Conference 2018 (MMSYS) in Amsterdam, where we presented a Demo of the immersive platform

November 2017 - June 2018

Research Intern

I3S / CNRS

During the course of the internship I did during my stay in France, I worked for 6 months on a research project aimed at the study of the Quality of Experience perceived by users when watching streamed VR/360 content. The project also involved working within a team of 3 developers to build an end-to-end platform for streaming 360° videos with heterogeneous quality. Here’s my contribution summarized:

  • Co-authored a paper presenting a study on the QoE in VR video streaming which gained a money prize from the DASH Industry Forum at MMSYS ‘18
  • Helped building the underlining VR video streaming app for Android
  • Tweaked the Google video streaming framework ExoPlayer to enable parallel streaming of separate video tracks, and implemented the adaptation logic and buffering strategy

March 2017 - August 2017

Creations

Derecom Music Player

Derecom is a music player app for iOS that I have been developing as a passion project in my spare time. It provides an alternative and more colorful interface to the system music player. It allows users to listen to their library, but also stream music, playlists, and radio stations from Apple Music. What I wanted to achieve was a music experience centered around building and maintaining your own music library, and where controlling and managing the playback queue has a prominent role. Derecom Music Player is available on the App Store since June 2019.

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Publications

Here’s a list of papers I co-authored during my work as a video streaming researcher (2017-2018).

Paper - A DASH Video Streaming System for Immersive Contents

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications require streaming 360° videos to implement new services in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment, art, e-health, e-learning, and smart factories. Providing a high Quality of Experience when streaming 360° videos is particularly challenging due to the very high required network bandwidth. In this paper, we showcase a proof-of-concept implementation of a complete DASH-compliant delivery system for 360° videos that: 1) allows reducing the required bitrate, 2) is independent of the employed encoder, 3) leverages technologies that are already available in the vast majority of mobile platforms and devices. The demo platform allows the user to directly experiment with various parameters, such as the duration of segments, the compression scheme, and the adaptive streaming algorithm parameters.

June 2018

Paper - Film Editing: New Levers to Improve VR Streaming

Streaming Virtual Reality (VR), even under the mere form of 360° videos, is much more complex than for regular videos because to lower the required rates, the transmission decisions must take the user’s head position into account. The way the user exploits their freedom is therefore crucial for the network load. In turn, the way the user moves depends on the video content itself. VR is however a whole new medium, for which the film-making language does not exist yet, its “grammar” only being invented. We present a strongly inter-disciplinary approach to improve the streaming of 360° videos: designing high-level content manipulations (film editing) to limit and even control the user’s motion in order to consume less bandwidth while maintaining the user’s experience. We build an MPEG-DASH-SRD player for Android and the Samsung Gear VR, featuring FoV-based quality decision and a replacement strategy to allow the tiles’ buffers to build up while keeping their state up-to-date with the current FoV as much as bandwidth allows. The editing strategies we design have been integrated within the player, and the streaming module has been extended to benefit from the editing. Two sets of user experiments enabled to show that editing indeed impacts head velocity (reduction of up to 30%), consumed bandwidth (reduction of up to 25%) and subjective assessment. User’s attention driving tools from other communities can hence be designed in order to improve streaming. We believe this innovative work opens up the path to a whole new field of possibilities in defining degrees of freedom to be wielded for VR streaming optimization.

June 2018

Things I Like

This is a section where I can share some of my passions and interests.

Cinema

Music

TV

Tech Stuff