Hermann Hellwagner

Klagenfurt University, Austria

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HTTP Adaptive Streaming – Where Is It Heading?

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Abstract: Video traffic on the Internet is constantly growing; networked multimedia applications consume a predominant share of the available Internet bandwidth. A major technical breakthrough and enabler in multimedia systems research and of industrial networked multimedia services certainly was the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) technique. This resulted in the standardization of MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH) which, together with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) by Apple Inc., is widely used for multimedia delivery in today’s networks.

 

Existing challenges in multimedia systems research deal with the trade-off between (i) the ever-increasing content complexity, (ii) various requirements with respect to time (most importantly, latency), and (iii) quality of experience (QoE). Optimizing towards one aspect usually negatively impacts at least one of the other two aspects if not both.

 

This situation sets the stage for our research work in the ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory (Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services; https://athena.itec.aau.at/), jointly funded by public sources and industry.

 

In this talk, we will present selected novel approaches and research results of the first year of the ATHENA CD Lab’s operation. We will highlight HAS-related research on: (i) multimedia content provisioning (machine learning for video encoding); (ii) multimedia content delivery (support of edge processing and virtualized network functions for video networking); (iii) multimedia content consumption and end-to-end aspects (player-triggered segment retransmissions to improve video playout quality); and (iv) novel QoE investigations (adaptive point cloud streaming). We will also put the work into the context of the international multimedia systems research.

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Biography: Hermann Hellwagner received the M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) and Ph.D. (Dr. techn.) degrees in Informatics from the University of Linz, Austria, in 1983 and 1988, respectively. He is a full professor of Informatics in the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC), Klagenfurt University, Austria, leading the Multimedia Communications group. Earlier, he held positions as an associate professor at the University of Technology in Munich (TUM) and as a senior researcher at Siemens Corporate Research in Munich.

 

His current research areas are distributed multimedia systems, multimedia communications, information-centric networking, and communication in multi-drone systems. He has received many research grants from national (Austria, Germany) and European funding agencies as well as from industry. He has published widely on parallel computer architecture, parallel programming, and multimedia communications and adaptation. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. He was a member of the Scientific Board of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (2005-2016) and an FWF Vice President (2013–2016). Currently, he is a member of the “CD Senate” of Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft (CDG).

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Max Mühlhäuser

Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

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New Interaction Modalities: "Cyber” Meets “Physical”

 

Abstract: We witness the era of digital transformation: ever more areas of our business and everyday lives are pervaded by information and communication technologies. However, the majority of *interactions* between humans and this “new digital world” still happens through traditional computer-prone means, mainly via screens that, by nature, *separate* the physical world—here: humans—from the digital world. In order to change this, two strands of research and development must be pursued: on one hand, interaction with the digital world must be tightly integrated with the physical world and with the way we perceive and ‘handle’ it; on the other hand, physical objects must be come ‘naturally’ interactive in the sense of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The talk will resume the above-mentioned grand challenges of HCI and then treat both strands of R&D mentioned above. A number of recent advancements in research will be discussed, and showcased via video. The talk will end with a little surprise.

 

Biography: Max Mühlhäuser is a full professor at Technical University of Darmstadt and head of the Telecooperation Lab. He holds key positions in several large collaborative research centers and is leading the Doctoral School on Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users.  He and his lab members conduct research on Human Computer Interaction, the future Internet, Intelligent Systems, and Cybersecurity, Privacy & Trust. Max founded and managed industrial research centers, and worked as either professor or visiting professor at universities in Germany, the US, Canada, Australia, France, and Austria. He is a member of acatech, the German Academy of the

Technical Sciences. He was and is active in numerous conference program committees, as organizer of several annual conferences, and as a member of editorial boards or a Guest Editor for journals such as ACM IMWUT, ACM ToIT, Pervasive Computing, ACM Multimedia, and Pervasive and Mobile Computing.

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G.R. Sinha

Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MII) Mandalay, Myanma

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Exploting Cognitive Science Capabilities and Brain Computing Research

 

Abstract: Medical Image Processing is study of acquisition, processing and analysis of various types of medical image modalities. Biomedical Imaging is one such modalities that mainly includes EEG, EMG, fMRI, MEG signals and their analysis for numerous applications such as diagnosis of mental disorder, sleep analysis, cognitive ability, study of memory and attention. Cognitive Science Research exploits biomedical modalities related to human brain and make use of the images in decoding brain commands and understanding them. This is very important in brain computer interface (BCI) and assessment of cognitive abilities. The abilities of human brain with the help of EEG signals can be described, decoded and used in performing desired tasks in numerous applications like robotics, driverless cars etc. EEG records brain activities especially electrical activities which are outcome of some psychological, physiological and other changes in human brain. The cognitive science research includes few major research domains such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, anthropology, nervous system. Each one of these domains studies different aspects of human brain, such as psychology deals with study of mind and behavior. This lecture highlights signal processing techniques for exploting capabilities of cognitive science and brain computing research, with the focus on role of optimization in cognitive workload assessment.

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Biography: G R Sinha is Adjunct Professor at International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) and currently deputed as Professor at Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MIIT) Mandalay Myanmar. He has been Visiting Professor (Honorary) in Sri Lanka Technological Campus Colombo for one year 2019-2020. He has published more than 200 research papers, book chapters and books at International level, that includes 3 text books, 9 edited books with reputed international publishers like Elsevier, Springer, IOP, CRC.He is Associate Editor IET-Electronics Letters, IET-Image Processing Journal and IEEE Access. He has been Dean of Faculty and Executive Council Member of CSVTU and currently a member of Senate of MIIT. Dr Sinha has been delivering ACM lectures as ACM Distinguished Speaker in the field of DSP since 2017 across the world. His few more important assignments include Expert Member for Vocational Training Program by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for Two Years (2017-2019); Chhattisgarh Representative of IEEE MP Sub-Section Executive Council (2016-2019); Distinguished Speaker in the field of Digital Image Processing by Computer Society of India (2015). He served as Distinguished IEEE Lecturer in IEEE India council for Bombay section. He is recipient of 12 awars and National and International level, to name few TCS Award 2014 for Outstanding contributions, Rajaram Bapu Patil ISTE National Award 2013, Engineer of the Year Award 2011, Young Engineer Award 2008. He has delivered more than 50 Keynote/Invited Talks and Chaired many Technical Sessions in International Conferences across the world.  He is Fellow of IEI, IETE and Senior Member of IEEE.  Dr Sinha has Supervised Eight (08) PhD Scholars, 15 M. Tech. Scholars and has been Supervising 01 more PhD Scholar. His research interest includes Cognitive Science, Medical Image Processing, Computer Vision, Outcome based Education (OBE) and ICT tools.