The OVID research project (relevance detection in Ophthalmic surgery VIDeos), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), will start on October 1st, 2018 and run for three years. Together with research partners from Klinikum Klagenfurt, it will allow three PhD students (and an accompanying student assistant) to investigate challenging new research questions at the intersection of computer science and ophthalmic surgery. In particular, automatic classification and prediction of relevant content in video recordings from ophthalmic surgeries (e.g., operation phases, surgical actions, irregular events and their cause) should be evaluated for the purpose of medical training and retrospective analysis of irregularities. The researchers want to address these goals by using methods from video analysis, video compression, and machine learning (including deep neural networks). An interview summarizing the research goals can be found here (in German): https://www.aau.at/blog/relevante-stellen-in-augenoperationsvideos-maschinell-erkennen/
On September 18, 2018 Christian Timmerer participates on the PhD defense committee of Mario Cordina at the University of Malta. The title of Mario Cordina’s PhD is “Cross-Layer Design for Multi-View Video Plus Depth Transmission over LTE Networks in Crowd Event Scenarios”. Additionally, he delivered an invited talk about “HTTP Adaptive Streaming — State of the Art and Challenges Ahead” at the University of Malta, Department of Communications and Computer Engineering.
Mathias Lux was invited to give a talk at Simula Metropolitan, a joint research center of SIMULA research labs and Oslo Metropolitan University. Besides the talk he took the opportunity to work for two days with the people at SIMULA and talk about future and ongoing projects. 
The project proposal “smART SocIal media eCOsytstems in a blockchaiN Federated environment” (ARTICONF) has been accepted and the project will be coordinated by ITEC under the leadership of Prof. Radu Prodan. There are seven participating project partners and the project duration is 36 months.