On Monday, 16 June 2025, Sabrina Größing, BEd and Dr Felix Schniz presented the Master’s Programme Game Studies and Engineering to an audience of bachelor students from the novel Liberal Arts programme.
The event aimed to showcase how easily they can continue their academic career within AAU, the opportunities and support structures awaiting them by doing so, and provide a gateway into studying at the university’s technical faculty.
On Friday, 13 June 2025, The Pioneers of Game Development Austria, the game development association focused on supporting, showcasing, and accelerating Austrian games, developers, and business, visited ITEC.
In an event organised by Dr Felix Schniz, Martin Filipp (Mi’pu’mi Games and PGDA representative) brought a delegation of industry representatives to campus, including Michael Benda (Zeppelin Studio), Raffael Moser (reignite games), and Manuel Bonell (Immerea). They held presentations on the status quo of the Austrian games industry and entertained a developer café in the afternoon, where students could sign up for discussion slots to ask questions about how to get into the industry and how to start your own gaming studio.
The event was visited by over 40 visitors, most of them students of the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering.
My dear colleagues,
The PGDA, the Austrian Game Developers Association, is going to visit us with a delegation
On Friday, 13 June, between 11.45am and 06.00pm in S.2.42, they are going to offer talks and opportunities for individual Developer Café chat sessions.
The schedule looks as follows:
11.45am: Room Opens
12.00pm: Introduction and PGDA session on the Austrian game industry today
12.45pm: PGDA talks on various topics, including genre
13.30pm: Break
02.00pm: Developer Café
06.00pm: Ending
You can register for a time slot to meet with and talk to one of the developers visiting us on the day of the event.
We are looking forward to seeing you there!
All the best,
Felix
Authors: Ahmed Telili (TII, UAE), Wassim Hamidouche (TII, UAE), Brahim Farhat (TII, UAE), Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria), Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria), Ibrahim Khadraoui (TII, UAE), Jiajie Lu (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), The Van Le (IVCL, South Korea), Jeonneung Baek (IVCL, South Korea), Jin Young Lee (IVCL, South Korea), Yiying Wei (AAU, Austria), Xiaopeng Sun (Meituan Inc. China), Yu Gao (Meituan Inc. China), JianCheng Huang (Meituan Inc. China) and Yujie Zhong (Meituan Inc. China)
Journal: Signal Processing: Image Communication
Abstract: Omnidirectional (360-degree) video is rapidly gaining popularity due to advancements in immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR). However, real-time streaming of such videos, particularly in live mobile scenarios such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), is hindered by limited bandwidth and strict latency constraints. While traditional methods such as compression and adaptive resolution are helpful, they often compromise video quality and introduce artifacts that diminish the viewer’s experience. Additionally, the unique spherical geometry of 360-degree video, with its wide field of view, presents challenges not encountered in traditional 2D video. To address these challenges, we initiated the 360-degree Video Super Resolution and Quality Enhancement challenge. This competition encourages participants to develop efficient machine learning (ML)-powered solutions to enhance the quality of low-bitrate compressed 360-degree videos, under two tracks focusing on 2× and 4× super-resolution (SR). In this paper, we outline the challenge framework, detailing the two competition tracks and highlighting the SR solutions proposed by the top-performing models. We assess these models within a unified framework, (i) considering quality enhancement, (ii) bitrate gain, and (iii) computational efficiency. Our findings show that lightweight single-frame models can effectively balance visual quality and runtime performance under constrained conditions, setting strong baselines for future research. These insights offer practical guidance for advancing real-time 360-degree video streaming, particularly in bandwidth-limited immersive applications.
On 10 June 2025, Dr Felix Schniz presented the Virtual Campus Environment, a central achievement of the UNESCO-funded project Global Campus Online (GLOCO). The project is led by the UNESCO-Chair Univ.-Prof. Dr Hans Karl Peterlini and revolves around the organisation of global meeting platforms to foster supportive environments and knowledge exchange.
The Virtual Campus Environment was fully developed and designed by ITEC staff members affiliated with Game Studies and Engineering, including Tom Tuček, Felix Schniz, and several generations of GSE students who supported the project as a part of their research internship.
Present for the public presentation were rector Ada Pellert and State Governor Peter Kaiser.
EUVIP 2025
October 13-16, 2025
Malta
Tutorial speakers:
Tutorial description:
As multimedia services like video streaming, video conferencing, virtual reality (VR), and online gaming continue to evolve, ensuring high perceptual visual quality is crucial for enhancing user experience and maintaining competitiveness. However, multimedia content inevitably undergoes various distortions during acquisition, compression, transmission, and storage, leading to quality degradation. Therefore, perceptual visual quality assessment, which evaluates multimedia quality from a human perception perspective, plays a vital role in optimizing user experience in modern communication systems. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of perceptual visual quality assessment, covering both subjective methods, where human observers directly rate their experience, and objective methods, where computational models predict perceptual quality based on measurable factors such as bitrate, frame rate, and compression levels. The session also explores quality assessment metrics tailored to different types of multimedia content, including images, videos, VR, point clouds, meshes, and AI-generated media. Furthermore, we discuss challenges posed by diverse multimedia characteristics, complex distortion scenarios, and varying viewing conditions. By the end of this tutorial, attendees will gain a deep understanding of the principles, methodologies, and latest advancements in perceptual visual quality assessment for multimedia communication.
Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation Special Issue on
Multimodal Learning for Visual Intelligence: From Emerging Techniques to Real-World Applications
In recent years, the integration of vision with complementary modalities such as language, audio, and sensor signals has emerged as a key enabler for intelligent systems that operate in unstructured environments. The emergence of foundation models and cross-modal pretraining has brought a paradigm shift to the field, making it timely to revisit the core challenges and innovative techniques in multimodal visual understanding.
This Special Issue aims to collect cutting-edge research and engineering practices that advance the understanding and development of visual intelligence systems through multimodal learning. The focus is on the deep integration of visual information with complementary modalities such as text, audio, and sensor data, enabling more comprehensive perception and reasoning in real-world environments. We encourage contributions from both academia and industry that address current challenges and propose novel methodologies for multimodal visual understanding.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Guest editors:
Guanghui Yue, PhD
Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
Email: yueguanghui@szu.edu.cn
Weide Liu, PhD
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Emai: weide001@e.ntu.edu.sg
Ziyang Wang, PhD
The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK
Emai: zwang@turing.ac.uk
Hadi Amirpour, PhD
Alpen-Adria University, Klagenfurt, Austria
Emai: hadi.amirpour@aau.at
Zhedong Zheng, PhD
University of Macau, Macau, China
Email: zhedongzheng@um.edu.mo
Wei Zhou, PhD
Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK
Email: zhouw26@cardiff.ac.uk
Timeline:
Submission Open Date 30/05/2025
Final Manuscript Submission Deadline 30/11/2025
Editorial Acceptance Deadline 30/05/2026
Keywords: Multimodal Learning, Visual-Language Models, Cross-Modal Pretraining, Multimodal Fusion and Alignment, Spatiotemporal Reasoning, Lightweight Multimodal Models, Applications in Healthcare and Robotics
Dr. Reza Farahani presented 3-hour tutorial titled “Serverless Orchestration on the Edge-Cloud Continuum: Challenges and Solutions” at the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) on May 5.
Abstract: Serverless computing simplifies application development by abstracting infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on building application functionality while infrastructure providers handle tasks, such as resource scaling and provisioning. Orchestrating serverless applications across the edge-cloud continuum, however, poses challenges such as managing heterogeneous resources with varying computational capacities and energy constraints, ensuring low-latency execution, dynamically allocating workloads based on real-time metrics, and maintaining fault tolerance and scalability across multiple edge and cloud instances. This tutorial first explores foundational serverless computing concepts, including Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), and their integration into distributed edge-cloud systems. It then introduces advancements in multi-cloud orchestration, edge-cloud integration strategies, and resource allocation techniques, focusing on their applicability in real-world scenarios. It addresses the challenges of orchestrating serverless applications across edge-cloud environments, mainly using dynamic workload distribution models, multi-objective scheduling algorithms, and energy-optimized orchestration. Practical demonstrations employ Kubernetes, serverless platforms such as GCP Functions, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, OpenFaaS, and OpenWhisk, along with monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana, to deploy and execute real-world application workflows, providing participants with hands-on experience and insights into evaluating and refining energy- and performance-aware serverless orchestration strategies.
Machine Learning-Based Decoding Energy Modeling for VVC Streaming
2025 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)
14-17 September, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
Reza Farahani (AAU Klagenfurt, Austria), Vignesh V Menon (Fraunhofer HHI, Germany), and Christian Timmerer (AAU Klagenfurt, Austria)
Abstract: Efficient video streaming requires jointly optimizing encoding parameters (bitrate, resolution, compression efficiency) and decoding constraints (computational load, energy consumption) to balance quality and power efficiency, particularly for resource-constrained devices. However, hardware heterogeneity, including differences in CPU/GPU architectures, thermal management, and dynamic power scaling, makes absolute energy models unreliable, particularly for predicting decoding consumption. This paper introduces the Relative Decoding Energy Index (RDEI), a metric that normalizes decoding energy consumption against a baseline encoding configuration, eliminating device-specific dependencies to enable cross-platform comparability and guide energy-efficient streaming adaptations. We use a dataset of 1000 video sequences to extract complexity features capturing spatial and temporal variations, employ Versatile Video Coding (VVC) open-source toolchain using VVenC/VVdeC with various resolutions, framerate, encoding preset and quantization parameter (QP) sets, and model RDEI using Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, Linear Regression (LR), and Shallow Neural Networks (NN) for decoding energy prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that RDEI-based predictions provide accurate decoding energy estimates across different hardware, ensuring cross-device comparability in VVC streaming.
Keywords: Video Streaming; Energy Prediction; Versatile Video Coding (VVC); Video Complexity Analysis.
Authors: Kurt Horvath, Dragi Kimovski, Radu Prodan
Venue: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing and Communications (IEEE EDGE 2025), July 7-12 Helsinki, Finland
Abstract: Scheduling services within the computing continuum is complex due to the dynamic interplay of the Edge, Fog, and Cloud resources, each offering distinct computational and networking advantages. This paper introduces SCAREY, a user location-aided service lifecycle management framework based on state machines. SCAREY addresses critical service discovery, provisioning, placement, and monitoring challenges by providing unified dynamic state machine-based lifecycle management, allowing instances to transition between discoverable and non-discoverable states based on demand. It incorporates a scalable service deployment algorithm to adjust the number of instances and employs network measurements to optimize service placement, ensuring minimal latency and enhancing sustainability. Real-world evaluations demonstrate a 73% improvement in service discovery and acquisition times, 45% cheaper operating costs and over 57% lesser power consumption and lower CO2 emissions compared to existing related methods.
