Radu participated and gave a keynote talk at the ICONIC 2024. To mark the 100th Birth Anniversary of Jean Bartik, one of the original six programmers of the ENIAC Computer, LPU hosted “BARTIK100 – International Conference on Networks, Intelligence and Computing (ICONIC-2024).” The conference provided a platform for scientists, researchers, academicians, industrialists, and students to assimilate the knowledge and get the opportunity to discuss and share insights through deep-dive research findings on the recent disruptions and developments in computing.

On Friday, 12 April 2024, seven representatives of the Pioneers of Game Development Austria (https://pgda.at/) visited the University of Klagenfurt for the event Press Start: Your Journey into Game Development, organised by the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering. The PGDA members, composed of different video game developers from all over Austria, provided insightful talks, gave feedback on student game projects, and provided personal support during a mentoring café. Attracting about 50 GSE students, academic staff, senate members, and many potential new students, the event can be considered the most successful in recent GSE history.

The enduring popularity of the Pokémon franchise can be explained by a mix of nostalgia, constant innovation, and their appeal to a wide and diverse fan base, as Felix Schniz, game studies scholar and senior scientist at the University of Klagenfurt, explains: Pokémon is a pioneer of this dynamic. The game perfectly shows how a franchise can stay fresh and relevant through the ongoing reinterpretation of its genre dimensions.

Read the whole interview here: Dringel, Severin: “Tag des Pokémon – Warum Pokémon 28 Jahre später immer noch ein Renner ist.” Kleine Zeitung International, 27.02.2024. https://www.kleinezeitung.at/international/18047876/warum-pokemon-auch-nach-zwanzig-jahren-immer-noch-ein-renner-ist

The 15th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (Technical Demos)

15-18 April, 2024 in Bari, Italy

Authors: Samuel Radler* (AAU, Austria) , Leon Prüller* (AAU, Austria), Emanuele Artioli (AAU, Austria), Farzad Tashtarian (AAU, Austria), and Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria)

As streaming services become more commonplace, analyzing their behavior effectively under different network conditions is crucial. This is normally quite expensive, requiring multiple players with different bandwidth configurations to be emulated by a powerful local machine or a cloud environment. Furthermore, emulating a realistic network behavior or guaranteeing adherence to a real network trace is challenging. This paper presents PyStream, a simple yet powerful way to emulate a video streaming network, allowing multiple simultaneous tests to run locally. By leveraging a network of Docker containers, many of the implementation challenges are abstracted away, keeping the resulting system easily manageable and upgradeable. We demonstrate how PyStream not only reduces the requirements for testing a video streaming system but also improves the accuracy of the emulations with respect to the current state-of-the-art. On average, PyStream reduces the error between the original network trace and the bandwidth emulated by video players by a factor of 2-3 compared to Wondershaper, a common network traffic shaper in many video streaming evaluation environments. Moreover, PyStream decreases the cost of running experiments compared to existing cloud-based video streaming evaluation environments such as CAdViSE.