This offer is an excellent opportunity to do a combined PhD at CERN and the University of Klagenfurt. If you are interested, find more information here.

ITEC is delighted to announce the next speaker in our guest lecture series – Prof. Carsten Griwodz from the University of Oslo & SIMULA Research Laboratory, Norway. The online-course will take place from March 5 – May 28, 2021.

This course is meant to provide the participants with the means for evaluating end-user satisfaction with interactive applications. Please register at the course 780.411.

Further information is available HERE.

Further details and registration available here: https://mile-high.video/

Teaching in times of Corona is a particular challenge. An online survey among AAU students shows that they were delighted with the digital teaching formats. Here you will find the best feedback from the students:
https://www.aau.at/feedback-zur-online-lehre/

Josef received very positive reviews, for example: “The course became more and more enjoyable, not only because of the content but also because of the technical aids: He integrated special effects, course intro, applause at the weekly quizzes, which significantly loosened the atmosphere.”

 

To strengthen our team spirit, ITEC members spent a wonderful skiing day together at Gerlitzen.

Read the whole article HERE.

The 3rd Klagenfurt Winter Game Jam took place Dec 20-22, 2019 and attracted more than 90 registrations. The event started with talks about the founding of an indie studio – Healing Bullet Games – from students of our master program on Game Studies and Engineering, and about game streaming from Marie Solle. More than 60 jammers then worked on games with the topic Unconventional Travel for the whole weekend, and 16 games where presented on Sunday. All the games of the jam can be found on https://itch.io/jam/3rd-winterjam/entries.

Photos from the jam are available at https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pet8u9JUkg7eJif89, moving images are here: https://youtu.be/FDWeyKjLnog

The paper “Deblurring Cataract Surgery Videos Using a Multi-Scale Deconvolutional Neural Network” has been accepted for publication at the “IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging”, located at Iowa City, Iowa, USA (April 3-7, 2020). This conference is a joint initiative from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS).
Authors: Negin Ghamsarian, Klaus Schoeffmann, Mario Taschwer

Abstract: A common quality impairment observed in surgery videos is blur, caused by object motion or a defocused camera. Degraded image quality hampers the progress of machine-learning-based approaches in learning and recognizing semantic information in surgical video frames like instruments, phases, and surgical actions. This problem can be mitigated by automatically deblurring video frames as a preprocessing method for any subsequent video analysis task. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a multi-scale deconvolutional neural network to deblur cataract surgery videos. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of the visual quality of frames as well as PSNR improvement.

Keywords: Video Deblurring, Deconvolutional Neural Networks, Cataract Surgery Videos

Acknowledgment: This work was funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund under grant P 31486-N31

Mathias Lux

The Hüttenjam 2019 is over and it has been a hugely successful event. 26 participants jammed for two days and two nights in four chalets at Marktlalm, on Turracher Höhe. Six games have been developed matching the topic “Can’t see the wood for the trees”. Games ranged from multiplayer hide and seek, to simulations, platformers, stealth, and puzzle games. All games can be found on Itch.io [1]. Besides working on the games we could socialize and network with joint breakfast and lunches and trips to the Nockiflitzer and Panoramaalm. For the motivated participants, there were running sessions in the morning and a hike to Rinsennock. 

General feedback by the participants indicated that people wanted to have a second edition next year. Responses on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram indicated that many more people are interested beyond the ones already attending. For Twitter top tweets had more than 70 likes [2], with the initial Facebook video we reached more than 700 people within a month, with the latest video we reached more than 70 people in a day [3]. 

Thanks a lot to all the sponsors who made this possible: Bitmovin, Förderverein Technische Fakultät, and Technische Fakultät der Universität Klagenfurt. If you want to spread the word about the event, feel free to use any photos or video from [4].

[1] All games online: https://itch.io/jam/huettenjam

[2] Hüttenjam on Twitter https://twitter.com/search?q=%23h%C3%BCttenjam

[3] Gamebert on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/gamebert

[4] Photos and videos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/BNEPzjoLJwLiP4kR6

Mathias Lux

The second Game Studies and Engineering and Game Jam retreat took place on June 27-29 at Marktlalm on Turracher Höhe. The curriculum committee, game jam volunteers and organizers of the GamePics jam and show came together to discuss ongoing and future activities of the AAU in the context of games.