Auszeichnungen von ITEC Mitarbeitern

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Happy Retirement to Hermann

On October 3rd, 2024, Hermann’s retirement was celebrated with a special event. During the celebration, the Governor of Carinthia presented him with the Grand Decoration of Honour from the State of Carinthia. In his farewell lecture, Hermann reflected on important topics from his 30-year career, many of which went beyond informatics. He spoke about issues that are relevant to all stages of working life. The lecture was titled “30 Years as an Informatics Professor: Insights and Outlooks.” Many colleagues and friends shared their experiences working with Hermann and wished him well in retirement. Prof. Erich Schwarz moderated the event.

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ITEC Wins Lifelog Search Challenge 2024 (LSC 2024) Again!

On June 10, 2024, the 7th Lifelog Search Challenge (LSC 2024), an international competition on lifelog retrieval took place as a workshop at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2024) in Phuket, Thailand. The LSC is organized by a large international team (Cathal Gurrin, Björn Þór Jónsson, Duc-Tien Dang-Nguyen, Jakub Lokoc, Klaus Schoeffmann, Minh-Triet Tran, Steve Hodges, Graham Healy, Luca Rossetto, and Werner Bailer) and attracted 21 teams from all around the world (Austria, Czechia, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, and Vietnam). The competition tests how fast and accurate state-of-the-art lifelog retrieval systems can solve search tasks (known-item search, ad-hoc search, visual question answering) in a shared dataset of about 720000 images, collected by an anonymous  lifelogger over 18 months. With the LIFEXPLORE system developed by Martin Rader, Mario Leopold, and Klaus Schöffmann, ITEC could win this competition for the second time in a row and was awarded for the Best LSC System. Congratulations!

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Hadi Amirpour received Best Paper Award @ 2024 Picture Coding Symposium

At the PCS 2024 (Picture Coding Symposium), held in Taichung, Taiwan from June 12-14, Hadi Amirpour received the Best Paper Award for the paper “Beyond Curves and Thresholds – Introducing Uncertainty Estimation To Satisfied User Ratios for Compressed Video” written together with Jingwen Zhu, Raimund Schatz, Patrick Le Callet and Christian Timmerer. Congratulations!

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Radu Prodan received Award for Editorial Excellence

Based on the 2023 TPDS editorial data and his excellent performance, Radu Prodan received the 2024 IEEE TPDS Award for Editorial Excellence. His achievement will be recognized by IEEE and his name will appear at the IEEE award website https://next-test.computer.org/digital-library/journals/td/tpds-award-for-editorial-excellence.

Congratulations!

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ITEC Video Retrieval System Awarded at International Video Search Challenge

The diveXplore video retrieval system, by Klaus Schoeffmann and Sahar Nasirihaghighi, was awarded as the best ‘Video Question-Answering-Tool for Novices’ at the 13th Video Browser Showdown (VBS 2024), which is an international video search challenge annually held at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM 2024), which took place this year in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. VBS 2024 was a 6-hours long challenge with many search tasks of different types (known-item search/KIS, ad-hoc video search/AVS, question-answering/QA) in three different datasets, amounting for about 2500 hours of video content, some performed by experts and others by novices recruited from the conference audience.

diveXplore teaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlt7w0pYWYE

diveXplore demo paper:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-53302-0_34

VBS info:

https://videobrowsershowdown.org/

SIGMM Test of Time Paper Honorable Mention in the category of “MM Systems & Networking”

We’re excited to share that the ACM Special Interest Group in Multimedia (SIGMM) presents to

Stefan Lederer, Christopher Müller, and Christian Timmerer

The SIGMM Test of Time Paper Honorable Mention in the category of “MM Systems & Networking”

for their paper “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP Dataset”. In Proceedings of the 3rd Multimedia Systems Conference, MMSys ’12, page 89–94, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM. doi:10.1145/2155555.2155570

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Klaus Schöffmann received BEST KIS-VISUAL award for IVR4B at CBMI2023

The Interactive Video Retrieval for Beginners (IVR4B) special session and competition took place on September 21, 2023, at the International Conference on Multimedia Indexing (CBMI2023) in Orleans, France. https://cbmi2023.org/

We are happy to announce that Klaus Schoeffmann could save the BEST KIS-VISUAL award for this competition, with his interactive video search system diveXplore.

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Hackathon – The Future of Education

 

 

 

 

 

 

From September 19-21, professors and students from the University of Klagenfurt met with FH Villach, FH St. Pölten, and HTL Villach students for the Future of Education Hackathon. During this event, they were split into three groups to work on concepts and solutions in AI, digital platform ecosystems, and gamification to solve various problems and improve the future of education. The gamification group consisted of Samuele and Elias from the master’s program Game Studies and Engineering and Noah and David from the HTL Villach for Informatics. Their supervisors during this event were Mathias Lux, Sebastian Uitz, and Wolfgang Hoi, with expert support from Fabian Schober on the event’s second day.

Throughout the 3 day event, they worked on a solution to utilize gamification to foster the development of skills, knowledge, and competencies and generate a motivating, clear, and exciting journey. Their solution consisted of a gamified study tracker, which tracks the student’s progress, recommends additional courses, and keeps the student motivated via quests and competition. This tracker is combined with the Study Buddy, an AI chatbot to interact with the student more naturally and ask them about their study, presents quests, and helps if the motivation drops. The final step of their solution was the “Job Tinder” which can be used to look for possible jobs in a fun way and which will recommend jobs based on the information gathered via the student tracker.

On the event’s last day, all solutions were pitched to a Jury, and after a lengthy discussion, the gamification team was elected as the winning team.

A video summary of this event is available via the following link. German only.

HACKATHON | The Future Of Education

 

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ITEC Wins the International Lifelog Search Challenge 2023 (LSC2023)

We are very happy to announce that Klaus Schoeffmann, with his lifelog retrieval system lifeXplore, has won the Lifelog Search Challenge 2023 (LSC2023). The LSC2023 was performed on June 12, 2023, in Thessaloniki, Greece, as a workshop at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR2023). In total, 30 different search tasks (known-item search, ad-hoc topic search, and question answering) had to be solved by all 14 international teams. After four hours of strong competition, lifeXplore came out on top of the other search systems and scored first.

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Congratulations to Priv.-Doz. Dr. Dragi Kimovski: Completion of the Habilitation Procedure

On 03.02.2023 , Dragi Kimovski defended his habilitation thesis “The Computing Continuum in the Internet-of-Things Era: Beyond the Cloud Data Centers”. In the meantime, the procedure has been completed and we were happy to hand out the certificate. Congratulations!

Dragi Kimovski is a tenure track researcher at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC), University of Klagenfurt. He earned his doctoral degree in 2013 from the Technical University in Sofia. He was an assistant professor at the University of Information Science and Technology in Ohrid and a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Innsbruck. Kimovski conducted multiple research stays at renowned universities, including the University of Michigan, the University of Utrecht, the University of Bologna, and the University of Granada. He co-authored more than 60 articles in international conferences and journals. His research interests include parallel and distributed computing and multi-objective optimization for energy efficiency and sustainability. He acted as a scientific coordinator and work-package leader in dozen Horizon 2020 projects (DataCloud, ENTICE, and ASPIDE).

Fog and edge computing have been introduced as an extension of the cloud services towards the data sources, thus forming the computing continuum. The computing continuum enables the creation of a new type of services, spanning across distributed infrastructures, supporting various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the introduction of the computing continuum raises multiple challenges for the management, deployment and orchestration of complex distributed applications, such as increased network heterogeneity, limited resource capacity of edge devices, fragmented storage management, high mobility of edge devices and limited support of native monolithic applications. Therefore, the habilitation thesis explores novel algorithms for low latency, scalable, and sustainable computing over heterogeneous resources for information processing and reasoning, thus enabling transparent integration of IoT applications. It tackles the heterogeneity challenge of dynamically changing computing infrastructure topologies and presents a novel concept for sustainable processing at scale.