Self Organizing Multimedia Architecture

In a meeting today the 1st (big) use case of the SOMA project was scheduled. On April 22nd 2010 a “World Games” event will take place in the offices of the Lakeside Labs. In four rooms different computer games will be played and locations all around the world will be assigned to the rooms. The videos and photos taken there will be sent to the actual location (Rio, New York, Tokio & Munich) using the Plantelab network, and the transported content then is presented in a lounge in the main lobby. Participating users are meant to take photos and videos and feed them into the SOMA network and – last but not least – having fun playing Rockband, Wii Sports Resort, Singstar and alike.

Why games? While we are totally aware that especially computer games have a bad reputation in computer science, they are means to an end for the SOMA project to gather a lot of participants for events and a lot of activity and action. Instead of paying participants we try to let them have a good time.

Where does the journey of ITEC go to? Under this slogan the research days 2010 have been held by the Institute of Information Technology. All researchers met for an internal workshop on 3rd and 4th February 2010 at the Hafnersee. Current research topics of the institute and future activities have been presented and discussed.

All ITEC members that work on the SOMA project participated at the research days:

Laszlo Böszörmenyi
The SOMA project and visions of the Distributed Multimedia Systems group.

Mathias Lux
User intentions

Roland Tusch
The SOMA LOOK2 use case

Stefan Wieser
Self-organizing Communication Layer

Anita Sobe, Marian Kogler, Manfred del Fabro
The internal SOMA use case “world game day” and its evaluation.

Photos of this event can be found HERE.

Ralf Klamma, Assistant Professor from Computer Science 5 – Information Systems at RWTH Aachen University, visited ITEC. He held this year’s course “Selected Topics in Distributed Systems: Multimedia Communities on the Web”. His colloquium „Virtual Campfire – A Hero’s Journey into Multimedia Storytelling“ took place on Friday, 29 January. Pictures  and slides about the talk are available HERE.

Mathias has been invited from Prof. Oge Marques to give a talk at Florida Atlantic University. He presented an IEEE Signal Processing Society Palm Beach Section Seminar on “User Intentions in Multimedia (“The Other End of the Camera”)”, on Tuesday (December 8).

Slides from the talk
Announcement

The IEEE Xtreme 24-hour programming competition took place on October 24, 2009!

Over 700 teams competed in this worldwide contest. Klagenfurt University was represented by Anita Sobe (ITEC), István Fehérvári (NES/Mobile Systems Group) and Bernhard Dieber (NES/Pervasive Computing Group). Their effort resulted in 25. place which is the upper 5% worldwide and a top-ten ranking in the IEEE region 08 (Europe, Middle East and Africa)!

For their presentation during ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing, Mathias and Christoph received the award for their “Dynamic presentation adaptation based on user intent classification”.

Click HERE to see the complete Video!

Certificate (pdf)

Mathias is the overall winner of the 2009 ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition with his open-source project   “Caliph & Emir“.

Further information: http://www.acmmm09.org/OSSC.aspx

Certificate (pdf)  &   Photo (pdf)

Laszlo Böszörmenyi was invited to give a keynote talk (Multimedia, Quo vadis?) and to participate in the Expert Panel (Thinking of a Picture and Finding it: Evolving MMedia Computer Interfaces) at the MMedia 2009 (July 20-25, 2009) in Colmar, France.

Anita Sobe and Laszlo Böszörmenyi received the Best Session Paper Award.

Photos from MMedia 2009 are posted at:
http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/PhotosMMEDIA09.html

The Research Days concentrate on the core competence of Lakeside Labs – Self-organizing Networked Systems. Once a year international experts devote themselves to a special topic in self-organization. This year, between July 13th and 17th, the Researchs Days were an intensive one-week session with workshop character of international eminent scientist in the field of selforganization.

The session emphasized on “robustness” in self organizing systems, with interesting talks and lots of productive group works. First ideas for joint publications and possibly future projects were made during the session.

Following participants took part in the event:
Christian Bettstetter, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Wilfried Elmenreich, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Johannes Klinglmayr, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Bernhard Rinner, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Alain Barrat, Centre de Physique Théorique, Italy
Thomas Bauschert, Universität Chemnitz, Germany
Claudia Tschoppe, Universität Chemnitz, Germany
Raissa D’Souza, University of California Davis, USA
Marc Timme, Pax-Planck Institute, Germany
Francis Heylighen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Hermann de Meer, University of Passau, Germany
Christian Hofbauer, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Nikolaj Marchenko, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Anton Riedl, Christopher Newport University, USA
Anne van Rossum, Almende B.V., Netherlands
Roland Tusch, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Laszlo Böszörmenyi, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Manfred del Fabro, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Marian Kogler, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Anita Sobe, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Felix Pletzer, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Stefan Wieser
Markus Quaritsch, Lakeside Labs / Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
Thomas Cap, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

You can find videoclips and interviews from this event here.
http://lakeside-labs.com/index.php?id=439

According to the ACM website, „the Senior Member grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 10 years of professional experience and five years of continuous professional membership who have demonstrated performance that sets them apart from their peers.“ Laszlo Böszörmenyi is one of the recipients!