Angeliki Katsenou | University of Bristol | September 29, 2020 | 10:00 (CET, 08:00 UTC)

Abstract: Cisco reported in the past reports that the video data share was expected to reach 80% by the year 2023. However, due to the pandemic and recently imposed a remote work lifestyle, this figure is expected to increase even more. Except for the on-demand and conferencing services, the number of users that are generating, storing, and sharing their content usually through either social media platforms or video-sharing platforms is increasing. Meanwhile from the video coding perspective, as video technologies evolve towards improved compression performance, their complexity inversely increases.

A challenge that many video service providers face is the heterogeneity of networks and display devices for streaming, as well as dealing with a wide variety of content with different encoding performance. In the past, a fixed bit rate ladder solution based on a „fitting all“ approach has been employed. However, such a content-tailored solution is highly demanding; the computational and financial cost of constructing the convex hull per video by encoding at all resolutions and quantization levels is huge. In this talk, we present a content-agnostic approach that exploits machine learning to predict the bit rate ladder with only a small number of encodes required.

Bio: Angeliki Katsenou is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and is with the Visual Information Lab at the University of Bristol since 2015. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece (2014). She received her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering and an M.Sc. degree in Signal and Image Processing from the University of Patras, Greece. She has experience in several FP7 EC-funded and EPSRC projects, such as MSCA-ITN PROVISION and EPSRC Platform Grant EP/M000885/1. Her research interests include perceptual video analysis, video compression, image/video quality, and resource allocation for video communication systems. She has also been involved with conference organization activities and is currently one of the Technical Program Co-Chairs for Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) 2021, Bristol, UK.

The review of the TEWI colloquium of Laura Toni from June 26, 2020 comprises the video and slides (below):

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.

The review of the TEWI colloquium of Lucia D’Acunto from June 24, 2020 comprises the video and slides (below):

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.

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.