Lucia D’Acunto | TNO | Wednesday, June 24, 2020 | 14:00 (CET, 12:00 UTC) | online (registration required for external attendees)

Abstract: In this talk, I will present the recent advancements on 5G for what concerns support for “the media vertical sector”, i.e., use cases involving the transmission of audiovisual content. I will begin by introducing the research that TNO has conducted on this topic in the past few years, starting with the H2020 TRIANGLE project, were we first adapted network orchestration to “communicate” with media orchestration components, such as a DASH Aware Network Element (DANE). Then, I will explain how we created media-specific 5G slices in the context of the H2020 5GINFIRE project, and what benefits media service providers can expect. I will further discuss about the advantages that edge computing offers to video production, based on our results from the H2020 FLAME project. Finally, I will give an overview of the standardization activities around this topic. I will conclude my talk with an outlook on future developments and offer some reflections on what researchers, telecom operators and service providers can expect.

Bio: Lucia D’Acunto received her PhD in 2012 from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, with a thesis on video streaming over peer-to-peer networks. She now works as a senior research scientist at TNO, focusing on video distribution and on the impact of future internet architectures (e.g. ICN, SDN and 5G) on it. She has led and is leading various European research projects on these topics, most notably the open call projects from the European Projects TRIANGLE, 5GINFIRE and FLAME. Since 2016, Lucia is an active participant and contributor to the 3GPP SA4 group, which focusses on mobile and 5G standardization for media applications. Lucia also serves in the organizing committees of several international conferences, usually in the roles of program chair or demo chair, and in the program committees. Lucia also regularly advises European operators on network and TV technologies and contributes to 5GPPP and NEM visions on the 5G Media Vertical and pilots. Lucia has published her research in several papers and journals and holds more than 15 patent applications.

Laura Toni | University College London (UCL), U.K | Friday, June 26, 2020 | 10:00 (CET, 8am UTC)

Abstract: A major challenge for the next decade is to design virtual and augmented reality systems (VR at large) for real-world use cases such as healthcare, entertainment, e-education, and high-risk missions. This requires VR systems to operate at scale, in a personalized manner, remaining bandwidth-tolerant whilst meeting quality and latency criteria. One key challenge to reach this goal is to fully understand and anticipate user behaviours in these mixed reality settings.

This can be accomplished only by a fundamental revolution of the network and VR systems that have to put the interactive user at the heart of the system rather than at the end of the chain. With this goal in mind, in this talk, we describe our current researches on user-centric systems. First, we describe our view-port based streaming strategies for 360-degree video. Then, we present more in details our research on of users‘ behaviour analysis, when users interact with the 360-degree content. Specifically, we describe a set of metrics that allows us to identify key behaviours among users and quantify the level of similarity of these behaviours. Specifically, we present our clique-based clustering methodology, information theory and trajectory base in-depth analysis. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the extension of this work to navigation within volumetric video sequences.

Bio: Laura Toni received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. In 2007, she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), San Diego, CA, USA, and since 2009, she has been a frequent visitor to the UCSD, working on media coding and streaming technologies. Between 2009 and 2011, she was with the Tele-Robotics and Application Department, Italian Institute of Technology, investigating wireless sensor networks for robotics applications. In 2012, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD, and between 2013 and 2016, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS4) at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. Since July 2016, she has been a Lecturer in the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department, University College London (UCL), U.K. Her research mainly involves interactive multimedia systems, decision-making strategies under uncertainty, large-scale signal processing, and communications. She received the UCL Future Leadership Award in 2016, the ACM Best 10% Paper Award in 2013, and the IEEE/IFIP Best Paper Award in 2012.

Giovambattista Ianni | University of Calabria, Italy | Wednesday, February 19th, 2020 | 14:00 s.t. | room S.1.42

Abstract:
The availability of advanced features for controlling technical aspects of grounding engines and solver modules for the answer set semantics allows great flexibility and enables the possibility to scale in otherwise out of reach applications. Nonetheless, the presence of nonobvious heuristic tuning „knobs“ deepens and widens the gap between knowledge representation technologies and software developers. In this talk, we present our recent introduction of incremental grounding techniques for answer set solvers in the perspective of videogame development, a challenging applicative domain in which design-time fast prototyping and run-time speed are at the highest priority.

Same as in-stream reasoning, videogames require repeated and fast-paced executions of decision-making tasks. In this context, we illustrate an incremental grounding approach for the answer set semantics. We focus on the possibility of maintaining incrementally larger ground logic programs; so-called „overgrounded programs“ can be generated, updated and reused transparently to the user and in combination with deliberately many different sets of inputs. The update burden of overgrounded programs requires a small effort, thus making the instantiation of logic programs considerably faster when grounding is repeated on a series of inputs similar to each other.

CV: Giovambattista Ianni is a full professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Calabria, Italy. Prof. Ianni’s current research interests include knowledge representation, reasoning, and coupling of hybrid systems. He recently focused his research interests on Artificial Intelligence in videogames with particular attention to the issue of complex and time-consuming incremental reasoning in real-time contexts. He has contributed to the DLV system and the DLVHEX system, especially dealing with the issue of dealing with, often non-symbolic, external information to knowledge bases. He has been involved in several national and international research projects and has been acknowledged with research awards such as the ICLP Test-of-time award 2018 and the Artificial Intelligence Journal Prominent Paper Award 2013.

Björn Thór Jónsson, Associate Professor

IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark & Reykjavik University, Iceland

02.03.2020 | 10.00 | S.2.42

Abstract:

Scalable retrieval of high-dimensional feature vectors is an important component of many applications in multimedia and other fields, but also a very challenging problem. In this talk, we discuss the challenges of high-dimensional indexing at scale, and then present two approximate indexing methods designed for large-scale retrieval. We present results from experiments with the two largest feature collections reported in the literature, 28.5 billion SIFT features on a single server and 42.9 billion SIFT features in a distributed setting, and demonstrate an application with interactive retrieval over the 99.2 million images of the YFCC100M collection.

CV:

Björn Þór Jónsson is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Reykjavík University, Iceland. Björn works in the broad field of Multimedia Analytics, applying multi-dimensional analysis concepts and techniques to large-scale multimedia collections.

Previously, Björn studied scalability of multimedia retrieval, where he was involved with the two largest feature vector collections reported in the literature. Björn has a special interest in promoting demonstrations, live events, and reproducibility, e.g. serving as Reproducibility Chair for ACM Multimedia 2019 and 2020. He served as general co-chair for MMM 2017 and CBMI 2019, and will co-organize ACM ICMR 2020 and SISAP 2020.

Prof. Daniele Fontanelli (Università degli Studi di Trento) 

24.01.2020 | 09.00 | B04a.1.06 (Lakeside Park)

Abstract:

Service robots are becoming more and more pervasive in modern societies. One of the ever increasing field of application are service robots able to help seniors in their daily duties. Indeed, ageing is generally associated with a decrease in mobility and social interaction: a growing body of research suggests that reduced levels of out-of-home mobility can have widespread, detrimental effects for older adults. With the median age in Europe projected to grow from 37.7 (2003) to 52.3 (2050), the population asking for mobility aids at an affordable price is becoming substantial.

In this talk, we briefly introduce our solution conceived for autonomous mobility: the FriWalk (i.e. Friendly Walker). Stemming from this example, we will present the fundamental problems for autonomous robots, i.e. localization, planning and control, with application-related scenarios. In particular, we will focus on three aspects of the technological solutions: the localisation problem using different low-cost sensing solutions, together with an optimal landmarks placement algorithm; the set of controlled guidance solutions implementing the authority sharing paradigm and modelled as hybrid systems; the activity and reactive planning approaches in actual application scenarios.

CV:

Daniele Fontanelli received the MSc degree in Information Engineering in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in Automation, Robotics and Bioengineering in 2006, both from the University of Pisa, Italy.  He was a Visiting Scientist with the Vision Lab of the University of California at Los Angeles, US, and an Associate Researcher with the Interdepartmental Research Center „E. Piaggio“, University of Pisa.  From 2008 he joined the University of Trento, Italy, where he is now an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering.   He is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement and for the IET Science, Measurement & Technology Journal.His research interests include localisation algorithms, service robotics, motion planning, human motion modelling, real-time control and estimation, and resource aware control.

Assoc.-Prof. Rui Abreu (Universität Lissabon) | 19.12.2019 | 10:00 Uhr | S.1.37

Abstract:

In the past decade, research on test-suite-based automatic program repair has grown significantly. Each year, new approaches and implementations are featured in major software engineering venues. However, most of those approaches are evaluated on a single benchmark of bugs, which are also rarely reproduced by other researchers. In this paper, we present a large-scale experiment using 11 Java test-suite-based repair tools and 2,141 bugs from 5 benchmarks. Our goal is to have a better understanding of the current state of automatic program repair tools on a large diversity of benchmarks. Our investigation is guided by the hypothesis that the repairability of repair tools might not be generalized across different benchmarks. We found that the 11 tools 1) are able to generate patches for 21% of the bugs from the 5 benchmarks, and 2) have better performance on Defects4J compared to other benchmarks, by generating patches for 47% of the bugs from Defects4J compared to 10-30% of bugs from the other benchmarks. Our experiment comprises 23,551 repair attempts, which we used to find causes of non-patch generation. These causes are reported in this presentation, which can help repair tool designers to improve their approaches and tools. This work was presented at ESEC/FSE19 and was given an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

CV:

Rui Abreu holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science – Software Engineering from TU Delft, The Netherlands, and a M.Sc. in Computer and Systems Engineering from the U.Minho, Portugal. His research revolves around software quality, with emphasis on automating the testing and debugging phases of the software development life-cycle as well as self-adaptation. He is the recipient of 7 Best Paper Awards (including a 2019 FSE  Distinguished Paper Award). Before joining IST, U.Lisbon as an Associate Professor (with habilitation), he was a member of the Model-Based Reasoning group at PARC’s System and Sciences Laboratory. He has co-founded DashDash in January 2017, a platform to create web apps using only spreadsheet skills. Currently, he is enjoying a sabbatical leave as a Visiting Scientist at Google NY’s. He is also passionate about soccer and a FC Porto fan.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Salle (Institut für Mathematik, Universität Osnabrück) | 12.12.2019 | 17:15 Uhr | C.0.16 (Gebäude Sterneckstraße)

Kurzfassung/Abstrakt: »Zum Denken benötigt der Mensch lediglich sein Gehirn« – insbesondere im Hinblick auf das Lernen einer abstrakten Disziplin wie Mathematik ist diese Auffassung weit verbreitet. Viele Forschungsarbeiten der letzten Jahre verdeutlichen jedoch die zentrale Rolle des Körpers in mathematischen Lern- und Kommunikationsprozessen. Im Vortrag werden empirische Ergebnisse vorgestellt, anhand derer die Bedeutung von Gesten für die Analyse von Kommunikations- und Lernprozessen herausgearbeitet sowie Konsequenzen für die Erforschung und Gestaltung mathematischer Lehr-Lern-Arrangements diskutiert werden. Gerahmt werden die Ergebnisse durch theoretische Betrachtungen zu Gesten und Multimodalität.

Lebenslauf: Studium des Gymnasiallehramts (2008) und Diplommathematik (2009), Promotion zum Dr. phil (2014) an der Universität Bielefeld 2014, seit 2015 Juniorprofessur für Didaktik der Mathematik an der Universität Osnabrück, 2018 Habilitationsäquivalenz durch positive Evaluation, Arbeitsgebiete: Analyse mathematischer Lernprozesse aus multimodaler Perspektive; Bedeutung von Gesten, Notizen und Mitschriften für mathematikbezogene Lern- und Kommunikationsprozesse, Grundvorstellungen mathematischer Inhalte (insbes. im Bereich der Trigonometrie), Übergang Schule-Hochschule, Mathematik und digitale Medien.

The review of the TEWI colloquium of Dr. Raimund Schatz from Nov 20, 2019 comprises the slides (below):

Abstract: Over last 15 years, Quality of Experience (QoE) has evolved from a buzzword to a holistic, mature scientific concept that captures the entire experience that a person has with a multimedia communication service (e.g. online video, web browsing, telephony, etc.). This talk provides an introduction to the concept of QoE and its operationalization in subjective experiments. To this end we first review the origins of QoE as well as the most useful definitions and frameworks that map the main QoE constituents and use cases. In the second part we go about operationalizing QoE, with a focus on how to design and conduct subjective QoE experiments that provide valid and reliable results.

CV: Dr. Raimund Schatz is Senior Scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Center for Technology Experience, where he coordinates the Research Field „Experience Measurement“. Furthermore, he is Post-Doctoral researcher at the ATHENA Christian-Doppler Laboratory (ITEC, AAU). Until 2015 he was Key Researcher and Area Manager at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Department of User-centered Interaction, Services, and Systems Quality. Raimund Schatz holds an Msc. in Telematics (TU-Graz), a PhD in Informatics (TU-Vienna), as well as an MBA and an MSc. from Open University Business School (UK). He is (co-)author of more than 130 publications in the areas of Quality of Experience, Service Quality, HCI and Pervasive Computing. Furthermore, he is or was actively involved in a number of QoE and HCI-related EU projects and networking activities, including SHOTPROS (H2020), Optiband (FP7), CELTIC QuEEN and COST Actions IC1003 Qualinet and IC1304 ACROSS, as well as the organization of various QoE-related conferences and workshops (e.g. QoENAM 2014, QoE-FI 2016, QCMAN 2016, QoE-Management 2017, QoMEX 2018, QoMEX 2019, etc.).

Dr. Petra Kralj Novak | December 9, 2019 | 16:00 | S.2.42

Abstract:

Social media are computer-based technologies that provide means of information and idea sharing, as well as entertainment and engagement handly available as mobile applications and websites to both private users and businesses.  As social media communication is mostly informal, it is an ideal environment for the use of emoji and for detecting the population’s sentiments and stance. Sentiment* and stance** analysis have been heavily researched in the last decade and the technology to address these data analysis tasks have developed rapidly. In this talk, several inspiring sentiment and stance analysis applications will be presented, varying in data source, topics, language, and approaches used. As a result of several years of experience in sentiment and stance analysis, best practices guidelines will be provided and remaining challenges exposed.
*Sentiment analysis is the field of study that analyzes people’s opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from a text.
**Stance analysis is the task of automatically determining from text whether the author of the text is in favor of, against, or neutral towards a proposition or target.

CV:

Dr. Petra Kralj Novak is a researcher at the Department of Knowledge Technologies, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research belongs to the wide area of knowledge discovery from databases. Currently, as a postdoctoral researcher, she analyses social and mainstream media focusing on the mediated sentiment and hate speech. Avant-garde research in analyzing the role of emojis in conveying sentiment was published in P. Kralj Novak, et al. „Sentiment of emojis“ and is the main reference for current research in the analysis of emoji. Dr. Kralj Novak publishes research papers and datasets in top academic venues. Her thesis focused on rule induction from class labeled data, where the induced rules are intended for human interpretation. The main findings of the thesis are published in Journal of Machine Learning Research and in the Encyclopedia of Machine Learning. She also designed and implemented GMOtreck – a system for optimization of laboratory level traceability of genetically modified organisms. Dr. Kralj Novak regularly serves in scientific programs of major academic and industrial conferences such as ICDM, ICML, DS, IDA, and Southern Data Science. She is PC chair of the  22nd International Conference on Discovery Science (2019, Split Croatia). From 2006 to 2009, and from 2018 on she is secretary and treasurer of SLAIS – the Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society. She has also actively collaborated in several national and European research projects. She is the coordinator of the EU REC AG project IMSyPP: Innovative Monitoring Systems and Prevention Policies of Online Hate Speech (2020-2022).

Dr. Raimund Schatz | Nov 20, 2019 | 10:00 | Lakeside B12b.1.1

Abstract: Over last 15 years, Quality of Experience (QoE) has evolved from a buzzword to a holistic, mature scientific concept that captures the entire experience that a person has with a multimedia communication service (e.g. online video, web browsing, telephony, etc.). This talk provides an introduction to the concept of QoE and its operationalization in subjective experiments. To this end we first review the origins of QoE as well as the most useful definitions and frameworks that map the main QoE constituents and use cases. In the second part we go about operationalizing QoE, with a focus on how to design and conduct subjective QoE experiments that provide valid and reliable results.

CV: Dr. Raimund Schatz is Senior Scientist at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Center for Technology Experience, where he coordinates the Research Field „Experience Measurement“. Furthermore, he is Post-Doctoral researcher at the ATHENA Christian-Doppler Laboratory (ITEC, AAU). Until 2015 he was Key Researcher and Area Manager at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna, Department of User-centered Interaction, Services, and Systems Quality. Raimund Schatz holds an Msc. in Telematics (TU-Graz), a PhD in Informatics (TU-Vienna), as well as an MBA and an MSc. from Open University Business School (UK). He is (co-)author of more than 130 publications in the areas of Quality of Experience, Service Quality, HCI and Pervasive Computing. Furthermore, he is or was actively involved in a number of QoE and HCI-related EU projects and networking activities, including SHOTPROS (H2020), Optiband (FP7), CELTIC QuEEN and COST Actions IC1003 Qualinet and IC1304 ACROSS, as well as the organization of various QoE-related conferences and workshops (e.g. QoENAM 2014, QoE-FI 2016, QCMAN 2016, QoE-Management 2017, QoMEX 2018, QoMEX 2019, etc.).