Junchen Jiang - Perception-Driven Internet Systems

Abstract: Internet systems serve as vital infrastructure, but what should they optimize for? Traditional approaches optimize system performance metrics, but improvements in system performance often cannot be perceived by the actual consumers of applications. This talk introduces a paradigm shift to optimize for the perception of consumers rather than performance metrics. This new paradigm also embraces the trend that consumers themselves are increasingly ML models (vision models and large language models), which also exhibit a wide range of sensitivities to system performance. This perception-driven paradigm offers new potential to improve the user experience for a broader audience. I will explain several projects as concrete case studies of this new paradigm.