I am part of the following project, along with Dylan McNamee and Crispin Cowan:

Our research group has developed a robust model for specifying QoS at application level. We are currently investigating the mapping problem: given an application-level QoS specification, we have to derive a physical presentation plan that delivers the requested quality, and among the plans that meet the QoS specification, we have to find the one that minimizes resource usage. We have built a prototype multimedia player with adaptive QoS control. We are interested in porting our player to NT to investigate the applicability of the NT environment to both user-level multimedia resource management research, as well as investigating various alternatives for kernel support of adaptive resource management.

In addition to the multimedia player, our work in adaptive systems is exploring the use of software feedback for client-server synchronization and dynamic QoS control for the Internet or similar environments. Our Internet distributed real-time MPEG video and audio player has already demonstrated the high effectiveness of the software feedback technique on multimedia applications running in such an environment.

We are investigating a systematic approach to software feedback mechanisms by developing a component library of well specified basic feedback filters and control algorithms. Modifying the components involved in the control algorithm or changing their parameters will enable the construction of complex interacting feedback mechanisms that will enable us to build different kinds of applications that can adapt according to user-specified behaviors or policies. We hope to bolster our claims of generality of this toolkit and components by extending our work from the Unix environment to NT.