Sunday, August 30, 2009

WWW2010: Call for Papers

The Call for Papers (CfP) for the WWW conference 2010 is available with the following important dates:
2009/10/10 .. Workshop proposals due
2009/10/26 .. Abstracts for papers and demos due
2009/11/02 .. Papers and demos due
2009/11/15 .. Tutorial proposals due
2010/01/21 .. Author notifications out
2010/02/11 .. Camera ready papers due
2010/04/26 .. Conference begins


Areas and Topics of Interest
A submission to any of the tracks may belong to one or perhaps a few of the following areas (see the list of topics for a more detailed description):
  • Search: Web indexing, searching, query processing, scoring, ranking, query log analysis.
  • Data Mining and Machine Learning: Deriving actionable insight from Web information sources: query logs, Web graph, social networks, click trails, text documents, etc.
  • Bridging Structured and Unstructured Data: Information extraction and integration, and next-generation searching and querying techniques that exploits these.
  • Social Networks: Models, algorithms, systems and issues around social networks and collaborative environments.
  • Semantic Web: Metadata representation and standards, ontologies, reasoning and logic, agents.
  • Security and Privacy: Theory and practice of data and system security, privacy, anonymization and cloaking, information contract codification, protocols.
  • Internet Monetization: Markets, auctions, games, pricing, advertising, and other Web-specific economic activities.
  • Software Architecture and Infrastructure: Processes, principles, methods, models, and architectures supporting the design and development of Web applications.
  • Performance, Scalability and Availability: System engineering issues for traditional and emerging Web applications.
  • Networking and Mobility: Communication protocols, robustness, security, mobile applications, content distribution.
  • Users Interfaces and Rich Interaction: Designing, streamlining and evaluating the interaction boundaries between users and the system, studies in cognitive load and its mitigation, multiparty interaction.
  • Rich Media: Web-scale management of rich media such as video, images, audio, and music; interactive media and collaboration.
Guidelines for Demos, Tutorials and Workshops
Demonstration Proposals

Demonstration proposals must adhere to the conference’s submission policies. They must be submitted electronically using the conference management tool, and in camera-ready format adhering to the formatting guidelines. They will appear in the conference proceedings. Demonstration proposals must be submitted by November 2, 2009 (9:000pm PDT). Proposals should be focused on new Web technology, advances in applying Web technology, or innovative use of Web-based techniques. Proposals must be submitted in camera-ready format and are limited to 4 pages. They should describe the demonstrated system, indicate what is going to be demonstrated, and state the significance of the contribution to database technology or applications. Demonstration proposals must not be published or under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Tutorial Proposals

Tutorial proposals must clearly identify the intended audience and its assumed background. Proposals must be no more than 5 pages and must provide a sense of both the scope of the tutorial and depth within the scope. The intended length of the tutorial (full day or half day) should also be indicated, together with justification that a high-quality presentation will be achieved within the chosen time period and the indication of the main learning outcomes. Proposals should also include contact information (name, email, address, telephone number, and FAX number) and a brief bio of the presenters. If the proposed tutorial has been given previously, the proposal should include where the tutorial has been given and how it will be modified for WWW 2010.

Proposals must be submitted electronically by November 15th, 2009 (9:00pm PDT). Tutorial presentations will be published and made available to WWW participants.

Workshop Proposals

WWW 2010 will again feature a number of co-located workshops. A workshop proposal should be no more than 5 pages and should include the workshop title, technical description of the the topic and issues, justification, chairs, potential program committee members, duration and history (if any) of the workshop. If the proposal is for a recurring workshop, information about attendance, number of submissions and accepted papers must be included in the proposal. Proposals should be submitted by October 10th, 2009 (9:00pm PDT).

WWW 2010 offers the usual serviced workshops, where registration, catering, room allocation and audio/visual will be organized by the conference organizers. The serviced workshops will take place on Monday and Tuesday, before the conference. The workshops will be hosted at the conference venue. Workshop proposals may have any duration from half-a-day to 1 day. Please indicate your preference for a date. Note that proposals must be unconditional concerning scheduling. It is very likely that some workshops will not get their preferred date.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Program of the 3rd European Symposium on Mobile Media Delivery (EUMOB) 2009

The program for the 3rd European Symposium on Mobile Media Delivery (EUMOB) 2009, co-located with MobiMedia 2009, is available here (PDF).

EUMOB will be held on Wednesday, 9th of September after the keynote given by Dr. Martin Hahn, EU Commission and Dr. Bart van Caenegem, EU Commission

The updated, detailed program* of EUMOB is as follows:
  • 12:00-12:20: Opening
  • 12:20-12:40: Optimisation of Multimedia over wireless IP links via X-layer design: an end-to-end transmission chain simulator by Catherine Lamy-Bergot (THALES Communications), Gábor Jeney (BME Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Gábor Feher (BME Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Gianmarco Panza (Cefriel), Matteo Mazzotti (CNIT), Esa Piri (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland), Tiia Sutinen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland), Janne Vehkaperä (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland), Roberta Fracchia (THALES Communications), Peter Amon (Siemens Corporate Technology)
  • 12:40-13:00: Distributed video coding with decoder-driven skip by Jurgen Slowack (Ghent University - IBBT), Jozef Skorupa (Ghent University - IBBT), Stefaan Mys (Ghent University - IBBT), Peter Lambert (Ghent University - IBBT), Christos Grecos (University of the West of Scotland), Rik Van de Walle (Ghent University - IBBT)
13:00 - 14:00: Lunch break
  • 14:00-14:20: Priority-based Transmission Scheduling for Delivery of Scalable Video Coding over Mobile Channels by Thomas Wiegand (Fraunhofer HHI and Technische Universität Berlin), Yago Sanchez de la Fuente (Fraunhofer HHI), Cornelius Hellge (Technische Universität Berlin), Thomas Schierl (Fraunhofer HHI)
  • 14:20-14:40: Adapted IPTV Service within novel IMS Architecture by Daniel Negru (CNRS-LaBRI, University of Bordeaux), Julien Arnaud (CNRS-LaBRI University of Bordeaux), Julien Pauty (Viotech Communications), Mamadou Sidibe (Viotech Communications), Harilaos Koumaras (NCSR Demokritos, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications)
  • 14:40-15:00: Personalized adaptation and presentation of annotated videos for mobile applications by Sarah De Bruyne (Ghent University - IBBT - MMLab), Jan De Cock (Ghent University - IBBT - MMLab), Rik Van de Walle (Ghent University - IBBT - MMLab), Peter Hosten (RWTH Aachen University), Mark Asbach (RWTH Aachen University), Mathias Wien (RWTH Aachen University), Cyril Concolato (TELECOM ParisTech)
  • 15:00-15:20: Evaluation of an Information Service for enhanced Multiaccess Media Delivery by Jukka Makela (Technical research centre of Finland), Markus Luoto (Technical research centre of Finland), Tiia Sutinen (Technical research centre of Finland), Kostas Pentikousis (Technical research centre of Finland)
15:20-15:40: Coffee break (tentative)
  • 15:40-16:00: Transformation Techniques for Future Video Coding by Stijn Notebaert (Ghent University -- IBBT), Kenneth Vermeirsch (Ghent University -- IBBT), Jan De Cock (Ghent University -- IBBT), Rik Van de Walle (Ghent University -- IBBT), Peter Lambert (Ghent University -- IBBT)
  • 16:00- 16:20: Unequal loss protection and multiple description coding: a performance comparison by Tammam Tillo (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering - Xi‘an Jiaotong-Liverpool University), Enrico Baccaglini (Dipartimento di Elettronica - Politecnico di Torino), Gabriella Olmo (Affiliation: Dipartimento di Elettronica - Politecnico di Torino)
  • 16:20-16:40: An Experimental Approach of Video Quality Level Dependence on Video Content Dynamics by Daniel Negru (CNRS-LaBRI, University of Bordeaux), Harilaos Koumaras (Business College of Athens, Computer Science Department), Julien Arnaud (CNRS-LaBRI, University of Bordeaux), Anastasios Kourtis (NCSR Demokritos Inst. of Informatics and Telecom)
  • 16:40-17:00: Enhanced vertical handover based on 802.21 framework for real-time video streaming by Ilias Politis (University of Patras), Michail Tsagaropoulos (University of Patras), Tasos Dagiuklas (TEI of Messolonghi), Stavros Kotsopoulos (University of Patras)
* ... the exact time slots are subject to changes.

STreaming Day 2009: Genova, 21 September 2009

http://www.stday09.dibe.unige.it/technical.html

09:30 Opening


Parallel SESSION I: Implementations (chairman: M. Raggio)

09:45 "H264 Encoder SIMD implementation on xSTream architecture"
Massimo Bariani, Paolo Lambruschini, Marco Raggio
(Università degli Studi di Genova)

10:15 "On-chip Communication Infrastructures for the Integration of Video IP cores in a Multi Processor System-on-Chip"
Sergio Saponara, Luca Fanucci, Michele Casula, Marcello Coppola
(Università di Pisa/ STM)

10:45 "An Advanced Error Concealment Framework for H.264/AVC Video Sequences"
Ennio Gambi, Giorgio Rascioni, Susanna Spinsante
(Università Politecnica delle Marche)

11:15 Coffee break

11:30 "A cloud-based video game streaming system for pervasive gaming"
Audrius Jurgelionis, Francesco Bellotti, Alessandro De Gloria, Peter Eisert, Alex Shani
(Università degli Studi di Genova)

12:00 "Scalable multiple description coding of video sequences"
Lorenzo Favalli, Marco Folli
(Università degli Studi di Pavia)



Parallel SESSION II: Video Transport Techniques (chairman: F. Rovati)

09:45 "On the fly Gaussian Elimination decoding for LT codes"
Valerio Bioglio, Marco Grangetto, Rossano Gaeta, Matteo Sereno
(Università di Torino)

10:15 "Video Unequal Error Protection with Network Coding"
Nikos Thomos, Jacob Chakareski, Pascal Frossard
(EPFL)

10:45 "A Layered Piece-Picking Algorithm for Peer-to-Peer networks"
Michael Eberhard, Christian Timmerer, Hermann Hellwagner
(Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt)

11:15 Coffee break

11:30 "Evaluation of Network Coding Procedures in P2P networks"
Riccardo Bernardini, Roberto Cesco Fabbro, Roberto Rinaldo
(Università di Udine)

12:00 "SEACAST: A protocol for Peer-to-Peer Video Streaming Supporting Multiple Description Coding"
Simone Zezza, Enrico Magli, Gabriella Olmo, Marco Grangetto
(Politecnico di Torino/ Università di Torino)

12:30 "Priority-based Transmission of Scalable Video Coding"
Yago Sanchez de la Fuente, Cornelius Hellge,Karsten Grüneberg, Thomas Schierl
(Fraunhofer HHI)


13:00 Lunch


SESSION III: Video Coding Techniques (chairman: D. Alfonso)

14:15 "Combined use of ToF sensors and standard cameras for 3D video acquisition"
Carlo Dal Mutto, Valeria Garro, Pietro Zanuttigh, Guido M. Cortelazzo
(Università di Padova)

14:45 "Latency Analysis for Current Multiview Video Compression"
Narciso Garcia, Pablo Carballeira, Juan Casal
(Universidad Politecnica de Madrid)

15:15 "Video Communication: Future Applications Challenges and Technical Solutions"
Thomas Wiegand
(Fraunhofer HHI / TU Berlin)

15:45
Coffee break


16:00 "Distortion Estimate for Motion-Adaptive Temporal Transforms with Noise"
Fabio Verdicchio, Yiannis Andreopoulos
(University College London)

16:30 "A semianalytical model for the quality vs. rate tradeoff in Medium Grain Scalable H.264 coders"
Michele Cesari, Lorenzo Favalli, Marco Folli
(Università di Pavia)

17:00 Panel Discussion and Best Presentation Award

Saturday, August 22, 2009

W3C Relaunches Multimodal Interaction Working Group

W3C is pleased to announce the relaunch of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group to develop technology that enables users to use their preferred modes of interaction with the Web. Deborah Dahl (Invited Expert) chairs the group which is chartered to develop open standards to adapt to device, user and environmental conditions, and to allow multiple modes of Web interaction including GUI, speech, vision, pen, gestures, haptic interfaces, sensor data, etc. W3C Members may use this form to join the Working Group. Read about the Multimodal Interaction Activity.

Very interesting as this WG aims bringing the Emotion Markup Language to Candidate Recommendation. So far the Elements of an EmotionML 1.0 have been identified as a W3C Incubator Group Report. Interestingly, ISO/IEC MPEG also has emotions within the scope of its MPEG-V work item. I wonder whether both groups could benefit from each other, the one way or the other ... let me know what is your opinion.

Friday, August 21, 2009

NEM Summit - Towards Future Media Internet - Last chance to exhibit

Next week is the last chance to exhibit at the upcoming 2009 NEM Summit.

Don't miss the opportunity to take advantage of one of the major event in the ICT field in Europe, featuring more than 50 exhibitors including:
  • the European Commission
  • 12 commercial exhibitors (BCE, Thomson, Orange, Intel, INRIA, etc.)
  • 18 European projects
  • 20+ exhibitors from the Images & Réseaux cluster
Full details and exhibitors list can be found at http://www.nem-summit.eu. Contact Florent Genoux as soon as possible to secure your booth, and make sure to register before the end of the next week; deadline for early bird registration fees.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Ausschreibung einer freien Stelle an der Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Die Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt schreibt gem. §§ 107 Abs. 1 i.V.m. 128 Universi-tätsgesetz 2002 folgende Stelle zur Besetzung aus:

EDV-Technikerin/EDV-Techniker

am Institut für Informationstechnologie, Forschungsgruppe Multimediakommunikation, Fakultät für Technische Wissenschaften, im Beschäftigungsausmaß von 50% (Basis nach KV: IIIa, vormals v2/2). Voraussichtlicher Beginn des Angestelltenverhältnisses ist der 15. September 2009.

Aufgabenbereich:
  • Technische Betreuung der Arbeitsplatz- und Ausbildungsrechner, Peripherie, Netzwerke sowie System- und Anwendungssoftware des Instituts für Informationstechnologie.
  • Technische Betreuung der speziellen, für Lehre und Forschung des Instituts für Informationstechnologie benötigten DV-Geräte, Systeme, Netzwerke und Software, z. B. Systeme und Werkzeuge für die Multimedia-Kommunikation, für mobile Multime-dia-Systeme, spezielle Netzwerke.
  • Programmieraufgaben, die die Lehrtätigkeit und Forschungsprojekte des Instituts unterstützen oder für die Erfüllung der o. g. Aufgaben erforderlich sind.
Voraussetzungen für die Einstellung:
  • Matura, (wenn möglich unter Einschluss technischer Fächer oder mit vergleichbaren Zusatzausbildungen), oder erfolgreich abgelegte, facheinschlägige Studienberechtigungsprüfung.
  • Kenntnisse und nach Möglichkeit praktische Erfahrung mit den Betriebssystemen Unix/Linux und Windows sowie in Hardware- und Netzwerktechnik.
  • Bereitschaft zur Weiterbildung in Hardware- und Software-Bereichen.
Erwünscht sind:
  • Programmierung in einer systemnahen höheren Programmiersprache, z.B. C oder C++.
  • Kenntnisse in Web-Technologien und Web-Programmierung, z.B. HTML, PHP.
  • Einschlägige Berufserfahrung.
Die Universität strebt eine Erhöhung des Frauenanteils beim technischen Personal an und fordert daher qualifizierte Frauen zur Bewerbung auf. Frauen werden bei gleicher Qualifikation vorrangig aufgenommen.

Menschen mit Behinderungen oder chronischen Erkrankungen, die die geforderten Qualifikationskriterien erfüllen, werden ausdrücklich zur Bewerbung aufgefordert.

Bewerbungen sind mit den üblichen Unterlagen bis spätestens 10. September 2009 unter der Kennung 596/09 an die Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Dienstleis-tungseinrichtung Personal / Fachabteilung Personalentwicklung, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, zu richten.

Es besteht kein Anspruch auf Abgeltung von entstandenen Reise- und Aufenthaltskosten, die aus Anlass des Aufnahmeverfahrens entstehen.

Weitere Informationen erteilt:
Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Hermann Hellwagner, Tel.: +43 (0)463/2700-3612
E-Mail: hermann.hellwagner@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
Homepage: www.uni-klu.ac.at/tewi/inf/itec/mmc

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Second Amendment to "Most Wanted: MPEG-21 Industry Adoptions"

Again I need to amend my previous blog posts concerning MPEG-21 industry adoptions (1st edition, 1st amendment) with www.enikos.com which provides a video and advertising platform based on MPEG-21 that could create a DI on a time line, but also allowed people to mash-up video, audio, music and ads into a widget. You may try it out as it has a free beta trial.

Wow, I'm happy that the list is growing and I'll soon issue a second edition of the MPEG-21 industry adoptions.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

MPEG-V: Media Context and Control


The committee drafts of parts 1-4 of MPEG-V are publicly available:
Related document (e.g., context/objectives, requirements, etc.) can be found in the here under "General".

Recently, I've presented a paper at QoMEx2009 which is related to MPEG-V.

Open PhD and master thesis positions

I'm looking for two PhD and several master thesis students for an EC-funded research project* within the following areas:
  • End-to-End multimedia architectures within content- and context-aware networks
  • In-network adaptation of Scalable Video Coding (SVC), transcoding, and multicasting
  • Quality of Service and Quality of Multimedia Experience
Requirements: Basic knowledge in the areas above, ability to work on your own, flexibility, and high motivation to work in a friendly atmosphere
Project duration: 3 years (PhD)
Start: PhD (approx. end of 2009/beginning of 2010), master thesis (early 2010)

For questions or in case you are interested, please contact me at christian(dot)timmerer(at)itec(dot)uni-klu(dot)ac(dot)at (please replace (at) by @ and (dot) by .). Also, please distribute this to people you think they might be interested - THANK YOU!

* the project is in challenge 1 (Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures Strategic) and objective ICT 2009.1.5 Networked media & 3D Internet

Saturday, August 1, 2009

1st edition of QoMEx revisted


The first edition of the International Workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEx) ended today and I'd like to thank the general chairs Touradj Ebrahimi (EPFL/NTNU) and Khaled El-Maleh (Qualcomm) for making this happen and, in particular, Qualcomm for hosting the event. It was a very good workshop with a lot of interesting papers presenting research results around the topics user experience assessment/enhancement, visual/auditory user experience, and standardization activities in multimedia quality evaluation.

The technical program provided a set of plenary talks (incl. a broad range of topics), oral and poster sessions, and a panel about tools, targets, and trends in the area of Quality of Experience (QoE). The panel - organized by Fernando Pereira - was particularly interesting as each panelist provided one slide related to tools, targets, and trends respectively.

Sebastian Möller (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Berlin University of Technology) reported that QoE is being recognized and considered by operators. Stefan Winkler, author of the Digital Video Quality book, has shown the the "QoS/QoE life-cycle" which he adapted from ITU-T Rec. G.1000 and COM12-C185-E. He is also very active in the Video Services Forum, Inc. (VSF) and ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF) which provide standards in the area of QoE.
Alan Bovik said he is a video guy that likes perception. Furthermore, he identified the need for better models how image/video is perceived which indeed requires interdisciplinary as shown in the left figure. Finally, Gary Sullivan's target regarding QoE is to have something like “This technology saves x% of the bit rate relative to that technology”. Towards the end of the panel Vittorio Baroncini proposed to merge VCEG and VQEG as the "only solution".

The winner of the Qualcomm Best Student Paper is "Subjective assessment of H.264/AVC video sequences transmitted over a noisy channel" co-authored by Francesca De Simone et.al. The best paper award goes to "Gradient Ascent Paired-Comparison Subjective Quality Testing" co-authored by Stephen Voran and Andrew Catellier. Congratulations to the winners and, of course, also the nominees (seven in each category) who will be invited to submit their papers to a special issue on QoE in an EURASIP journal.

On the logistics, they managed to provide an online stream of all the sessions via ustream, recorded all sessions using a 3D camera, and collected the presentations of all speakers. I'm sure sooner or later these resources become available at the QoMEx Web site.

Finally, the next edition - QoMEx 2010 - will be in Trondheim, Norway hosted by NTNU with Andrew Perkis as the general chair in the second half of June 2010. It seems he will have a hard time to attach to QoMEx 2009 but I'm also sure he will manage it and will be able to keep, or even increase, the level of quality in this workshop on Quality of Multimedia Experience. See you at QoMEx 2010 and stay tuned...

PS: Forgot that we had a paper there and details about this can be found here.