Every minute, more than 500 hours of video material are published on YouTube. These days, moving images account for a vast majority of data traffic, and there is no end in sight. This means that technologies that can improve the efficiency of video streaming are becoming all the more important. This is exactly what Hadi Amirpourazarian is working on in the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA at the University of Klagenfurt. Read the full article here.

The new 5G standard will bring data centers closer to the customer. ITEC researchers are developing a system for the rapid distribution of computing tasks.
The newspaper “Der Standard” reported and published the article “Verteiltes Rechnen dank Fog-Computings“.

 

The kick-off meeting of the FF4EuroHPC Project “CardioHPC” took place online on Friday, March 11, 2022. The purpose of this first meeting was primarily the definition of work structures, work packages, and getting to know each partner region. The project partners consist of the following institutions: INNO, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopjee,  and Klagenfurt University

 

Electronic health records, like ELGA in Austria, provide an overview of laboratory results, diagnostics and therapies. Much could be learned from the personal and private data of individuals – with the help of machine learning – for use in the treatment of others. However, the use of the data is a delicate matter, especially when it comes to diseases that carry a stigma. Researchers involved in the EU project “Enabling the Big Data Pipeline Lifecycle on the Computing Continuum (DataCloud)” are working to make new forms of information processing suitable for medical purposes. Dragi Kimovski and his colleagues recently presented their findings in a publication. Read the complete article here.

 

Second online meeting between Austria and China took place on 21.02.2022. Consortium discussed aspects of sustainable transportation networks, #blockchain and new development strategies in line with #UnitedNations #IYBSSD #SDGs

Vignesh V Menon

2022 NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology (BEIT) Conference

April 24-26, 2022 | Las Vegas, US

Conference Website

Vignesh V Menon (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt),  Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Feldmann (Bitmovin, Klagenfurt),
Adithyan Ilangovan
(Bitmovin, Klagenfurt), Martin Smole (Bitmovin, Klagenfurt), Mohammad Ghanbari (School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, UK), and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt).

Abstract:

Current per-title encoding schemes encode the same video content at various bitrates and spatial resolutions to find optimal bitrate-resolution pairs (known as bitrate ladder) for each video content in Video on Demand (VoD) applications. But in live streaming applications, a fixed bitrate ladder is used for simplicity and efficiency to avoid the additional latency to find the optimized bitrate-resolution pairs for every video content. However, an optimized bitrate ladder may result in (i) decreased storage or network resources or/and (ii) increased Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper, a fast and efficient per-title encoding scheme (Live-PSTR) is proposed tailor-made for live Ultra High Definition (UHD) High Framerate (HFR) streaming. It includes a pre-processing step in which Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)-energy-based low-complexity spatial and temporal features are used to determine the complexity of each video segment, based on which the optimized encoding resolution and framerate for streaming at every target bitrate is determined. Experimental results show that, on average, Live-PSTR yields bitrate savings of 9.46% and 11.99% to maintain the same PSNR and VMAF scores, respectively compared to the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) bitrate ladder.

Architecture of Live-PSTR

Prof. Radu Prodan

In Carinthia, researchers find an open test laboratory in the 5G Playground Carinthia, where the possibilities of the new mobile phone technology can be explored. The problem is: 5G enables the fast transmission of large amounts of data, but these also have to be processed. Read the whole interview of Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Radu Prodan in the latest University Klagenfurt news.

The project “CardioHPC” (CardioHPC Improving DL-based Arrhythmia Classification Algorithm and Simulation of Real-Time Heart Monitoring of Thousands of Patients) has been accepted in the “First call for FF4EuroHPC application experiments” (funded under the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Programme). Prof. Prodan will take over the project management in Klagenfurt.

The goal is to conduct an experiment to improve our DL-based arrhythmia classification algorithm and conduct a large-scale demonstration experiment to simulate a monitoring center for automated monitoring and alerting for 10K patients through HPC, focusing on quality and identifying HPC as a key tool for innovation.

Project Partners: The University of Stuttgart, Innovation Dooel, University in Skopje

Project duration: 15 months

In a hybrid (i.e. online and offline) attendance mode at the project meeting in Ohrid, Macedonia, the ARTICONF team gave a final push to have a unified and integrated ARTICONF toolset for DApp developers. The consortium led by project coordinator Prof. Prodan also outlined a detailed action plan for the remaining six months with regards to exploitation and dissemination of ARTICONF’s latest results and developed technologies.

 

Prof. Radu Prodan

The Horizon Cloud Summit 2021 – at its second edition – aims to gather innovators and researchers, Cloud adopters, policymakers, and Cloud initiatives and open source projects to shape the EU digital transition.

Radu Prodan held an online presentation: “ARTICONF: A Cloud-agnostic Blockchain-as-a-Service for Social Continuum on December 09, 2021.