We are happy to announce that the Call for Papers for our conference Video Game Cultures 2023: Exploring New Horizons is online now.
Please see our website for more info and submission.
ICME`23 July, 2023, Brisbane, Australia
Organizers:
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Hadi Amirpour, University of Klagenfurt
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Angeliki Katsenou, Trinity College Dublin, IE and University of Bristol, UK
Abstracts
Video streaming in the context of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is replacing legacy media platforms and its market share is growing rapidly due to its simplicity, reliability, and standard support (e.g., MPEG-DASH). It results in an increasing number of video content, where nowadays, video accounts for the vast majority of today’s internet traffic either in the form of user-generated content (UGC) or pristine cinematic content. For HAS, the video is usually encoded in multiple versions (i.e., representations) of different resolutions, bitrates, codecs, etc. and each representation is divided into chunks (i.e., segments) of equal length (e.g., 2-10 second) to enable dynamic, adaptive switching during streaming based on the user’s context conditions (e.g., network conditions, device characteristics, user preferences). Read more
Athors: Alexander Lercher, Nishant Saurabh, Radu Prodan
The 15th IEEE International Conference on Social Computing and Networking
http://www.swinflow.org/confs/2022/socialcom/
Abstract: Community evolution prediction enables business-driven social networks to detect customer groups modeled as communities based on similar interests by splitting them into temporal segments and utilizing ML classification to predict their structural changes. Unfortunately, existing methods overlook business contexts and focus on analyzing customer activities, raising privacy concerns. This paper proposes a novel method for community evolution prediction that applies a context-aware approach to identify future changes in community structures through three complementary features. Firstly, it models business events as transactions, splits them into explicit contexts, and detects contextualized communities for multiple time windows. Secondly, it %it performs feature engineering by uses novel structural metrics representing temporal features of contextualized communities. Thirdly, it uses extracted features to train ML classifiers and predict the community evolution in the same context and other dependent contexts. Experimental results on two real-world data sets reveal that traditional ML classifiers using the context-aware approach can predict community evolution with up to three times higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score than other baseline classification methods (i.e., majority class, persistence).
A new online article about Graphmassivizer has been published in the Science blog; check it out HERE.
On 20 October 2022 Felix gave the talk “Walk Like an Englishman? The Cultural Experience of Walking Simulators” as part of the Transformative Play Initiative 2022 conference at Uppsala University, Sweden.
The content of the presentation was accepted for an article in the International Journal of Role-Playing (IJRP).
Felix talk titled “A Walk in the Park? Designing a Very British Gaming Experience” which he will be given together with Christoph Kaindel has been accepted for the Future and Reality of Gaming (FROG) Conference 2022 at Danube University Krems.
On the first two days of October 2022, Sebastian Uitz and Michael Steinkellner presented their game “A Webbing Journey” at the Vienna Comic Con 2022 (VIECC 2022). The new demo level from Gamescom was incorporated into the existing demo and replaced the old first level. In addition, the art style was updated, and the new arachnophobia mode was added to help everyone enjoy our game, even those afraid of spiders. This event was the biggest Austrian event we attended yet, with over 35.000 visitors. Next to meeting some cool Austrian game devs and having many happy players, we also had an interview with the FM4 Spielekammerl about our game.
From Wednesday, 24.08.2022, until Sunday, 28.08.2022, players from all over the world played our game “A Webbing Journey” at Gamescom 2022 in Cologne. Our booth was run by Sebastian Uitz, Manuel Santner, and Fabian Schober, and we have been one of the only two Austrian games in the indie area this year. The second one is Gibbon from Broken Rules. The size of the Gamescom is just crazy compared to the Austrian events, with over 250.000 people attending this year. We prepared a new demo level for this event, and the feedback was great, as always. In addition, we made valuable connections to the games industry through other game devs, publishers, and the press.
The futurezone Awards 2022 are looking for the most innovative ideas and projects. Three finalists (each category) have now been selected from the numerous submissions.
ITEC was nominated for two projects: 5G Virtual Realities and GAIA (together with Bitmovin).
The ADAPT workshop took place in Macau, China, on 09 Oct 2022 at the IEEE ITSC conference with more than 50 international attendees! The ADAPT-Team has successfully participated!
Bitmovin, a leading provider of video streaming infrastructure, and the University of Klagenfurt announced they will collaborate on a two-year joint research project worth €3.3million to develop a climate-friendly adaptive video streaming platform called ‘GAIA’. The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) will co-fund the project, providing an initial €460,000 in funding for the first year.
Project ‘GAIA’ aims to identify ways to improve sustainability and reduce energy consumption across the end-to-end video streaming chain by
- Enabling energy awareness and accountability, including benchmarking and predicting energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions across the entire delivery chain, from content creation and server-side encoding to video transmission and client-side rendering.
- Reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions through advanced analytics and optimizations on all phases of the video delivery chain.