Selected Publications

For full list, please visit my Google Scholar profile.

Conference Papers

Predict, Prune, Play: Efficient Video Playback Optimization Under Device Diversity and Drift

Published in USENIX NSDI, 2026

Harsha Sharma*, Pouya Hamadanian*, Arash Nasr-Esfahany, Zahaib Akhtar, Mohammad Alizadeh

SODA: An Adaptive Bitrate Controller for Consistent High-Quality Video Streaming

Published in ACM SIGCOMM, 2024

Tianyu Chen, Yiheng Lin, Nicolas Christianson, Zahaib Akhtar, Sharath Dharmaji, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, Adam Wierman, and Ramesh K. Sitaraman.
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Coal not Diamonds: How Memory Pressure Falters Mobile Video QoE

Published in ACM CoNEXT, 2022

Talha Waheed, Zahaib Akhtar, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi.
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AViC: A Cache for Adaptive Bitrate Video

Published in ACM CoNEXT, 2019

Zahaib Akhtar, Yaguang Li, Ramesh Govindan, Emir Halepovic, Shuai Hao, Yan Liu, Subhabrata Sen.
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Understanding Video Management Planes

Published in ACM IMC, 2018

Zahaib Akhtar*, Yun Seong Nam*, Jessica Chen, Ramesh Govindan, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Sanjay Rao, Jibin Zhan, Hui Zhang.
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Oboe: Auto-tuning Video ABR Algorithms to Network Conditions

Published in ACM SIGCOMM, 2018

Zahaib Akhtar*, Yun Seong Nam*, Ramesh Govindan, Sanjay Rao, Jessica Chen, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Bruno Ribeiro, Jibin Zhan, Hui Zhang.
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^* Authors marked with an asterisk contributed equally.