Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt participates in New FP7 Project on Social Networks

Social media applications have become a modern reality affecting a growing part of the population, as well as companies and public organisations. For example, twitter messages played an important role in the recent developments in Arab countries, while Flickr and YouTube are rich image and video collections based exclusively on user contributions and around 30 billion content items (links, photo albums, status updates) are posted on Facebook every month. It becomes clear that, much of what happens in the real-world is documented in real time by the millions of social network users that upload content, interact with each other, and give feedback (rate, comment) on already published online content. It is equally important that social networks and applications can be used for a plethora of diverse applications, beyond sharing, networking, news and entertainment. For example, they have been used for emergency planning and response, in travel and tourism, in e-government, and in product monitoring.

SocialSensor is a 3-year FP7 European Integrated Project, which aims at exploiting information in social networks and developing applications that enhance user experience. In the project framework, new techniques for analysis, aggregation and real-time search of user-generated content will be developed, in order to extract useful information and make it available for use in different applications. Innovative solutions from the fields of information extraction and retrieval, social network analysis, user modelling, semantic web services, and media adaptation, delivery and presentation, will compose a software platform that crawls and analyses multimedia User Generated Content from the social web, combines it with professional content, and makes it searchable for professional users, but also recommends, delivers and presents it to media consumers depending on their context and their personal profile. To achieve this, crucial issues have to be tackled, such as the sheer data volume, its heterogeneity and low quality.

The platform will be showcased and evaluated in two use cases: (a) news, involving professional news editors, journalists and casual readers, benefiting from the improved capabilities of SocialSensor for discovering new interesting social content and integrating it in the news creation and delivery lifecycle, and (b) infotainment, providing new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences to attendants of large events (e.g. festivals). Providing real-time social indexing capabilities for both of these use cases is expected to have a transformational impact on both sectors.

In the project, whose total budget is €9.64 million, Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Multimedia Communications Group participates, with research activities on media streaming and sharing within social networks. The consortium comprises 11 participants in total, coming from different universities and research organizations (CERTH-Informatics and Telematics Institute (co-ordinator), University of Koblenz-Landau, City University London, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), as well as from the IT industry and news domains (IBM Israel, Yahoo! Spain, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Deutsche Welle, Athens Technology Center, JCP-Consult).

For more information please contact: Dr. Christian Timmerer, AAU/TEWI/ITEC/MMC, christian.timmerer@itec.aau.at or the co-ordinators Dr. Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH-ITI, ikom@iti.gr

Computing Now 3rd Anniversary: A Social Networking Perspective

Please find below a social networking perspective I've put together for Computing Nows' 3rd year anniversary using Storify. Let me know your thoughts and ideas in the comments....

ACM Workshop on Advanced Video Streaming Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks and Social Networking

Camere-ready deadline extension: July 26, 2010
Workshop held within ACM Multimedia, 25-29 October 2010, Firenze, Italy

http://www.p2pstreaming.eu
[PDF | TXT]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a promising technology for video streaming, and offers advantages in terms of robustness, re-configurability and scalability.  In this context, social networks and social services are emerging as a potential new driver for content delivery networks. Specifically, social networks potentially provide a new level of understanding and knowledge related to the interaction between people within a virtual space. Many emerging multimedia based services and applications have started to exploit the ‘social graph’ in new ways for establishing a basis for social recommendations, filtering etc.). As yet, one unexplored area of research relates to the exploiting the social graph for informing adaptive behaviour in P2P-based multimedia systems. On the other hand, the P2P video technology is still challenging, due to the need of reducing start-time and churn-induced instability, to the asymmetry of residential broadband connections, and to high packet loss rates due to router congestion and transmission errors on the physical network, node departure from the P2P overlay, strict timing out due to real time visualization. The lack of guarantee about the actual delivery of the data may cause drops in the reproduction quality and service outages. The workshop objective is to solicit novel contributions on all aspects of P2P-based video coding, streaming, and content distribution which is
informed by social networks.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Innovative P2P-based video streaming solutions
• P2P-based social media content distribution networks
• Advanced video coding techniques for real-time P2P applications: layered/scalable video coding, multiple description coding, distributed source coding
• Identification and design of proper metrics for performance evaluation and monitoring including Quality of Service/Experience
• Content and context analysis and modelling for P2P-based social media distribution
• Filtering and recommendation systems
• Error-resilience tools for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• Rate control and bandwidth adaptation for both single streams and multiple stream multiplexing
• Cross layer optimization issues
• Protocols for peer-to-peer multimedia services
• P2P streaming prototype implementation for both live and on-demand streaming
• Advertisement, payment, and cashing systems
• Applications, standards, and practical deployments

Invited Talk

Audio/visual content and metadata delivered over the open Internet using P2P-Next: some experiences from a broadcaster's perspective

by George Wright, Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and Development

The best paper award (€300) is sponsored by RADVISION (http://www.radvision.com/).

Important Dates

• Paper submission: June 1014, 2010 (extended)
• Notification of acceptance: July 10, 2010
• Camera-ready submission: July 2026, 2010 (due to constraints imposed by ACM)
• Workshop date: October 29, 2010

Submission Guidelines
Papers should not exceed five pages in length, following the ACM proceedings format. Papers must be original and have not been published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. Each paper will be reviewed by three members of the program committee, recognised for their competence in the field. Final decision about inclusion in the workshop proceedings will be taken by the PC members exclusively on the basis of the obtained reviews and levels of recommendation. Papers must be registered using the ACM Multimedia conference management software (http://www.edas.info/N9045).

Accepted papers will be included in the workshop's proceedings which will be published together with the proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010. Additionally, a special issue or an edited volume is planed based on the best papers of the workshop.

Workshop Organisers:
  Gabriella Olmo, Politecnico di Torino
  Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University
  Pascal Frossard, EPFL
  Keith Mitchell, University of Lancaster

Demonstrations
  Njål Borch, NORUT, Norway

Program Committee
  Jari Ahola, VTT, Finland
  Peter Amon, Siemens, Germany
  Riccardo Bernardini, Università di Udine, Italy
  Njål Borch, NORUT, Norway
  Giancarlo Calvagno, Università di Padova, Italy
  Luca Celetto, STMicroelectronics, Italy
  Pablo Cesar, CWI, The Netherlands
  Jaime Delgado, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
  Marek Domanski, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
  Kalman Graffi, TU Darmstadt, Germany
  Marco Grangetto, Università di Torino, Italy
  Hermann Hellwagner, Klagenfurt University, Austria
  Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, Germany
  Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria
  Enrico Magli, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
  Pierangelo Migliorati, Università di Brescia, Italy
  Daniel Negru, University of Bordeaux, France
  Jens-Rainer Ohm, RWTH Aachen, Germany
  Jörn Ostermann, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
  Giovanni Pau, University of California at Los Angeles, US
  Fernando Pereira, IST, Portugal
  Roberto Rinaldo, Università di Udine, Italy
  Thomas Schierl, HHI, Germany
  Iraj Sodagar, Microsoft, US
  Marco Tagliasacchi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  Tammam Tillo, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China
  Stefano Tubaro, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
  Theodore Zahariadis, Synelixis Solutions Ltd, Greece

The workshop is partly sponsored by the project “ARACHNE: Advanced video streaming techniques for peer-to-peer networks,” funded by the Italian Ministry for Education and Research (www.diegm.uniud.it/arachne), and partly by the EC-funded “P2P-Next” project (www.p2p-next.org).