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Short talks and poster presentations at the doctoral consortium at the IEEE CoG 2025

IEEE Conference on Games 2025

In Lisboa, Portugal, 26-29th August, 2025

 

Author: Tom Tucek

Title: Using Large Language Models to Create Meaningful and Dynamic Interactions in Serious Game Contexts

Abstract: Video games have become the most successful entertainment medium, both in terms of financial success and as a carrier of modern culture. At the same time, recent trends in generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), are bringing about a paradigm shift in how humans interact with games and computers in general. The unpredictability of generative AI has already been utilized to create fun experiences within games, but the same aspect makes it difficult to use in serious contexts (e.g., games dealing with minority status), where unwanted output can potentially cause harm. This doctoral research proposes to find out how LLMs can be used in video games with serious contexts to create and enhance meaningful experiences. Following design science principles, role-playing game (RPG) prototypes that utilize this new technology and deal with serious topics are created and tested for their efficacy in terms of user engagement, narrative coherence, and lasting impact (e.g., changed views or behavior after extended periods of time). Iterative development and validation, through user tests and heuristic evaluations, ensure that the created video game prototypes have the desired effects and findings are incorporated into a framework, which in turn is validated in a long-term study. Other aspects, such as data privacy and latency, are also addressed by focusing on the local deployment of AI models, instead of cloud-based services. The main contribution of this research is a framework that improves the reflected use of generative AI in video games, increasing narrative coherence and player engagement while enabling the creation of games that allow for meaningful, personalized, and dynamic experiences.

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Short talks and poster presentations at the doctoral consortium at the IEEE CoG 2025

IEEE Conference on Games 2025

In Lisboa, Portugal, 26-29th August, 2025

Author: Kseniia Harshina

Title: Developing a Video Game for Empathy and Empowerment in the Context of Forced Migration Experiences

Abstract: This dissertation explores how video games can be designed to foster empathy and empowerment in the context of forced migration. While existing games often focus on raising awareness, they frequently exclude displaced individuals from the design process. To address this, the project proposes a participatory, AI-assisted storytelling system that allows people with lived migration experience to co-create and replay interactive scenes based on personal memories.

The research follows a three-phase structure: data collection through surveys and a participatory game jam; iterative development of an interview-to-game prototype using a locally run large language model (LLM); and a mixed-methods evaluation. The system includes an interview-based chatbot interface, automatic scene generation, and post-game reflection tools. The evaluation examines the system’s emotional, psychological, and representational impact across three player groups: scene authors (migrant participants), other displaced individuals, and players without migration experience.

The project contributes to generative AI research, HCI, and game studies by combining participatory design, storytelling, and technical implementation. It offers both a theoretical framework and a functional prototype to inform future practices in socially responsive game design.

 

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Games Intersectional Symposium 2025

Main Organizer: Kseniia Harshina (AAU)

Co-Organizers: Rachel Gorden (AAU), Tan Schütz, Tom Tucek (AAU)

Date: September 19-20th 2025, fully online

The Games Intersectional Symposium is being held for the first time this Friday and Saturday. It is a space for queer and other under-represented voices in video games to share their thoughts and experiences. The schedule is full of speakers from various backgrounds, who will present their talks, performances, game demos, and many other things! The event is organised by the Games Intersectional Round-table and will be held fully online, using Gather.

More information can be found here: https://gamesintersectional.github.io/gi-symposium25/

If you have any questions or would like to join, please contact Kseniia (kseniia.harshina@aau.at) or Tom (tom.tucek@aau.at)!

 

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Daniele Lorenzi has successfully defended his PhD thesis

On Thursday, July 30, 2025, Daniele Lorenzi successfully defended his PhD thesis (QoE- and Energy-aware Content Consumption for HTTP Adaptive Streaming) under the supervision of Prof. Hermann Hellwagner and Prof. Christian Timmerer. The defense was chaired by Assoc.-Prof. DI Dr. Klaus Schöffmann and the examiners were Assoc. – Prof. Luca De Cicco and Dr.-Ing. habil. Christian Herglotz.

We are pleased to congratulate Dr. Daniele Lorenzi on successfully passing his Ph.D. examination!

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GSE Presentation of GLOCO Virtual Campus Project

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.

Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation Special Issue – Call for Papers

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:

  • Multimodal data alignment and fusion strategies with a focus on visual-centric modalities
  • Foundation models for multimodal visual representation learning
  • Generation and reconstruction techniques in visually grounded multimodal scenarios
  • Spatiotemporal modeling and relational reasoning of visual-centric multimodal data
  • Lightweight multimodal visual models for resource-constrained environments
  • Key technologies for visual-language retrieval and dialogue systems
  • Applications of multimodal visual computing in healthcare, transportation, robotics, and surveillance

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

 

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Reza Farahani gave a tutorial at the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)

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.

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IEEE ICIP’25: Machine Learning-Based Decoding Energy Modeling for VVC Streaming

Machine Learning-Based Decoding Energy Modeling for VVC Streaming

2025 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)

14-17 September, Anchorage, Alaska, USA

https://2025.ieeeicip.org/

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Paper accepted: SCAREY: Location-Aware Service Lifecycle Management

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.


 

 

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Invited Guest Talk

On 12 May, Dr Felix Schniz held an invited guest talk at the Department of Culturology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

In his talk, Felix discussed to challenges and necessities of Critical Theory thinking on an age of digital pessimism with a focus in game studies:

The Frankfurt School is a long-standing moral pillar of cultural studies. As the lines between humankind, virtuality, and technology blur more and more, however, the Frankfurt School’s stance towards the cultural industry incrementally enters a fundamental crisis of purpose. In this guest lecture, I elaborate on the crisis of digi-pessimism by drawing a bridge from the early days of Frankfurt School thinking to its contemporary work on interactive virtual artworks on the example of video games. I outline the origins of the school and its vital key terms along with its most prominent thinkers, its importance in the analysis of cultural artefacts, and its challenges when confronted with a medium that is as highly capitalistic in its conception as it is subversive. Focusing on Bloodborne (FromSoftware 2015), I portray the difficulties of navigating a virtual world that fuses pop-culture gothic horror with practices of anti-capitalist resistance and the meaning of such spaces in the face of contemporary political and technological raptures.