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.
Title: Big data analytics in Industry 4.0 ecosystems
Authors: Gagangeet Singh Aujla, Radu Prodan, Danda B. Rawat
Journal: “Software: Practice and Experience”
Full editorial/article: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.3008
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
Title: Big Data Pipelines on the Computing Continuum: Tapping the Dark Data
Authors: Dumitru Roman, Radu Prodan, Nikolay Nikolov, Ahmet Soylu, Mihhail Matskin, Andrea Marrella, Dragi Kimovski, Brian Elvesæter, Anthony Simonet-Boulogne, Giannis Ledakis, Hui Song, Francesco Leotta, Evgeny Kharlamov
Abstract: Big Data pipelines are essential for leveraging Dark Data, i.e., data collected but not used and turned into value. However, tapping their potential requires going beyond existing approaches and frameworks for Big Data processing. The Computing Continuum enables new opportunities for managing Big Data pipelines concerning efficient management of heterogeneous and untrustworthy resources. This article discusses the Big Data pipelines lifecycle on the Computing Continuum, its associated challenges and outlines a future research agenda in this area.
April 24-26, 2022 | Las Vegas, US
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
As a Valentine’s day gift to video coding enthusiasts across the globe, we release Video Complexity Analyzer (VCA) version 1.0 open-source software on Feb 14, 2022. The primary objective of VCA is to become the best spatial and temporal complexity predictor for every frame/ video segment/ video which aids in predicting encoding parameters for applications like scene-cut detection and online per-title encoding. VCA leverages x86 SIMD and multi-threading optimizations for effective performance. While VCA is primarily designed as a video complexity analyzer library, a command-line executable is provided to facilitate testing and development. We expect VCA to be utilized in many leading video encoding solutions in the coming years.
VCA is available as an open-source library, published under the GPLv3 license. For more details, please visit the software online documentation here. The source code can be found here.
Heatmap of spatial complexity (E)
Heatmap of temporal complexity (h)
March 01-03, 2022 | Denver, CO, USA
Authors: Minh Nguyen (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria), Christian Timmerer (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria), Stefan Pham (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany), Daniel Silhavy (Fraunhofer FOKUS, Germany), Ali C. Begen (Ozyegin University, Turkey)
Abstract: With the introduction of HTTP/3 (H3) and QUIC at its core, there is an expectation of significant improvements in Web-based secure object delivery. As HTTP is a central protocol to the current adaptive streaming methods in all major over-the-top (OTT) services, an important question is what H3 will bring to the table for such services. To answer this question, we present the new features of H3 and QUIC, and compare them to those of H/1.1/2 and TCP. We also share the latest research findings in this domain.
Keywords: HTTP adaptive streaming, QUIC, CDN, ABR, OTT, DASH, HLS.
The Emmy® Awards do not only honour the work of actors and directors, but they also recognise technologies that are steadily improving the viewing experience for consumers. This year, the winners include the MPEG DASH Standard. Christian Timmerer (Department of Information Technology) played a leading role in its development. Read more about it here.
March 01-03, 2022 | Denver, CO, USA
Minh Nguyen (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Ekrem Çetinkaya (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Hermann Hellwagner (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), and Christian Timmerer (Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)
Abstract: The advancement of mobile hardware in recent years made it possible to apply deep neural network (DNN) based approaches on mobile devices. This paper introduces a lightweight super-resolution (SR) network, namely SR-ABR Net, deployed at mobile devices to upgrade low-resolution/low-quality videos and a novel adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm, namely WISH-SR, that leverages SR networks at the client to improve the video quality depending on the client’s context. WISH-SR takes into account mobile device properties, video characteristics, and user preferences. Experimental results show that the proposed SR-ABR Net can improve the video quality compared to traditional SR approaches while running in real-time. Moreover, the proposed WISH-SR can significantly boost the visual quality of the delivered content while reducing both bandwidth consumption and the number of stalling events.
Keywords: Super-resolution, Deep Neural Networks, Mobile Devices, ABR