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Game Studies and Engineering Courses X-CHANGE Master Theses

Game Engineering

The new Master’s degree programme Game Studies and Engineering is an interdisciplinary programme, instructing students on technical as well as analytical and ethical issues regarding video- and other games. Students with a bachelor degree in Computer Sciences or/and Humanities, an interest in the development, analysis, critical reflection of videogames and proficiency in spoken and written English, are encouraged to enroll in this programme. The focus of the curriculum is on the the multifold nature and contextualisation of games with regard to an array of different but interconnected areas of investigation.

The programme provides students with a platform to learn, study, and create games and multimedia applications. Engaged and motivated teachers and bottom-up teaching methods will involve students in game studies and game engineering and production. The practical nature of the program will be underpinned by a project semester as an integral part of the curriculum and international partners – including universities and companies – will connect students beyond campus limits.

Particularities

Interdisciplinary master programme game studies and game engineering
Taught entirely in English
Engaged and motivated lecturers
International partner universities and companies
Practical work, ie. a semester-long project, as part of the curriculum
Bottom-up teaching methods to involve students in game studies and game making
A platform to learn, study and make great games and multimedia applications

Topics

Introduction & Computer Game History ~ slides
Game Projects: Processes and Roles ~ slides
Game Projects: Documents and Pitches ~ slides see above
Prototyping ~ slides
Introduction to Programming ~ slides
Basic Concepts in Game Programming ~ slides
Playtests ~ slides
Hands On with Game Engines ~ slides
Toolchain

Modalities

This course is a Vorlesung, meaning that the grade is awarded after a final examination. The exam will be in written form, take 50 minutes of your time and will focus on the topics discussed in the course. A list of possible exam questions is available here.

Courses

ITEC offers many courses to choose from undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Current courses during the semester:

Bachelor Studies – List of courses SS 2024
Master Studies – List of courses SS 2024

Ph.D. Studies – List of courses SS 2024

All courses offered by ITEC

Guest Lectures @ ITEC

Hosting academic notable guest lecturers on campus not only raises the visibility of Institute of Information Technology but also enhances the learning experience of our students. Guest lectures allow our students to gain insight into real-life business practices by being able to interact with business and industry leaders and enabling them to address questions directly to the experts from the field.

Guest lectures WS 2022/23

Selected Topics in Distributed Multimedia Systems: Computing Continuum at Gaming Scale by Prof. dr. ir. Alexandru Iosup & Prof. dr. ir. Ana Lucia Varbanescu

How to apply at AAU for courses

New starter checklists
Bachelor Applied Informatics
Master Applied Informatics
Doctoral Degree Programme

Expand your own horizon – study abroad or visit us in Klagenfurt!

Combine study and international travel: we offer a range of study programs for students wanting to study abroad or at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt.

Erasmus+ mobility

The Erasmus+ programme enables students to study for up to 12 months per study cycle (Bachelor, Master, PhD) at a European university outside of Austria.

We can support you to visit the following destinations:

Are you enrolled at the AAU and want to experience living and learning abroad?

Take advantage of ITEC´s international contacts and spend one semester or even a whole academic year abroad. Or are you interested in a shorter stay abroad? There are several options! Contact us for further details!

Master Theses topics @ ITEC

In their master thesis, students demonstrate their ability to independently solve problems in the area of their specialization using state-of-the-art scientific methods.

The following list of master theses reflects a variety of different topics and projects to work on. Students are encouraged to propose further topics suiting their personal professional interest.

In any case, please contact the advisor in due course.

360° video/VR content streaming over a 5G network prototype
Description: The Austrian “5G Playground” is currently being devised and built in the region, with AAU participating in this effort. We proposed to realize and test a 360° video/VR content streaming (to a head-mounted display) prototype in this upcoming 5G network, requiring both extremely high data rates and low latencies. The Master Thesis will substantially contribute to this effort.

Necessary qualifications: Good programming skills, knowledge in multimedia technology and systems

Supervisor: Hermann Hellwagner
Nature inspired Fog architecture for biomedical IoT applications
Description: The work in this thesis will be focused towards exploration of a novel concepts and methodologies for resource management in Fog environments that integrate the constricted memory, storage and computational resources of the edge devices with a Cloud architecture, therefore enabling low
latency decision making for time-sensitive biomedical IoT applications.

Necessary qualifications: basic knowledge in distributed systems, experience with containers and good programing skills.

Supervisor: Dragi Kimovski
Tasks scheduling in Fog environment
Description: The work in this thesis will be focused towards exploration of a novel concepts and methodologies for tasks scheduling in highly unstable Fog and IoT environments, therefore enabling efficient Fog resource provisioning and elastic IoT applications management.

Necessary qualifications: basic knowledge in distributed systems, experience with containers and good programing skills.

Supervisor: Dragi Kimovski
A step towards Cloud Nirvana : Exploiting the functional module semantics of a monolithic VMI into deployable Containers
Description: Virtualization is used in the data-centers and cloud environments to decouple applications from the hardware they run on. Hardware and operating system level virtualization are two prominent technologies that enable this. While hardware level virtualization is reciprocated as Virtual
Machines, Containers, which use OS level virtualization, have recently surged in interest and deployment. In this master thesis, we study the semantic description of Virtual machine image (templates for VMs) and Container Images, and implement an automatized approach to convert a VMI into container.
This work will extend our previous work “Expelliarmus”, which focussed on decomposing a monolithic VMI into functional modules on the basis of its semantic rich structure exploiting semantic similarity between differently user created VMI templates. At the end, thesis is expected to come up with an
approach to convert the functional modules into Container templates which can be deployed as perceived by user respecting the required customizations for docker technology.

Necessary qualifications: Python programming knowledge, Prior knowledge about Clouds IaaS, Virtualization (optional).

Supervisor: Nishant Saurabh
Provisioning Containers and VMs running at scale in a Hybrid Architecture for Cloud (Student 1) and Fog (Student 2) Environment
Description : In recent times, Containers are often perceived as light weight images and correspondingly an alternate to virtual machines. However, when running at scale, meaning when multiple applications are deployed at the same physical server, container bound applications tend to hijack the
resources of other VMs and containers giving rise to Performance interference depending upon the type of workloads. In this thesis, we will investigate the performance models for VMs and Containers when running in a hybrid architecture. At the end, work is expected to come up with a a resource
provisioning scheme for hybrid architecture with an Elasticity metric measured in two state of the architectures:
1) For Clouds: Using the relationship between functional services, cloud computational Resources (For Student 1)
2) For Fog Environment: Using the relationship between functional services, proximity, Fog computational resources (For Student 2)

Necessary qualifications: Python/Java programming knowledge, Prior knowledge about Clouds IaaS, Virtualization (optional).

Supervisor: Nishant Saurabh
A Scientific Workflow Execution Engine based on Google App Engine
Description: The work in this thesis will be focused towards exploration and implementation of a generic model and concept to run scientific workflows by using Google App Engine Queues, Datastore and Memcache. The main goal is to simultaneously optimize execution performance and cost.

Necessary qualifications: Good programming skills in one of the supported languages (Out of the box, App Engine supports Node.js, Java, Ruby, C#, Go, Python, and PHP)

Supervisor: Dragi Kimovski
Towards Serverless Workflow Executions based on AWS Lambda
Description: The work in this thesis will be focused towards exploration and implementation of a generic model and concept to run scientific workflows by using AWS Lambda and Amazon S3.

Necessary qualifications: Good programming skills in Java

Supervisor: Dragi Kimovski
Performance analysis of scientific applications with ASKALON
Description: ASKALON (http://www.askalon.org/) is an application development and computing environment for Cloud computing environments. The goal of this thesis is to deploy several scientific application on a federated Cloud in Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Amazon EC2 and evaluate their benefits on performance

Necessary qualifications: Java, OpenStack

Supervisor: Radu Prodan
Tool development with dynamic instrumentation
Description: Dynamic instrumentation is a technology that enables inserting new code into an already executing program (see http://www.dyninst.org/). The goal of this thesis is to use the dynamic instrumentation library to implement a novel runtime performance or debugging tool (such as a code
coverage tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage).

Necessary qualifications: C and operating systems

Supervisor: Radu Prodan
HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) and Quality of Experience (QoE)
Description: HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is the preferred technology for video streaming in today’s internet (e.g., Netflix, YouTube) and the global IP video traffic will be 82% of all IP traffic by 2021 according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI). Nielsen’s Law of Internet bandwidth [6] states that the users’ bandwidth grows by 50% per year, which will reach approximately 1 Gbps by 2021. The quality as experienced by the end user is determined by video quality, startup delay, stalls, quality switches, etc. and generally referred to as Quality of Experience (QoE).Thesis projects of all kind in the area of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) are solicited which are highly relevant in the context of MPEG (https://mpeg.chiariglione.org/) and Bitmovin (https://bitmovin.com/). For further details please contact the instructor Christian Timmerer.

Necessary qualifications: courses in the area of “Medieninformatik” are appreciated.

Supervisor: Christian Timmerer