May 20

Many thanks for your contributions to SVCVision 2010!

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Many thanks to everyone who contributed to the Workshop on Impact of Scalable Video Coding on Multimedia Provisioning (SVCVision) 2010.

http://www.mobimedia.org/ws_SVCVision.html

First, many thanks to all the people who submitted papers to the workshop.

Second, many thanks to all programm commitee members – your efforts to publicize the workshop helped to attract a very satisfying number of submissions.

The papers are now undergoing peer review. We aim to have every paper reviewed by three industry/academic reviewers. We will send out the acceptance notification by the 12th of June.

If you are interested in H.264/SVC, please join us in Lisbon (Portugal) in September. I’ll provide more information on the program and further logistics as they become available.

May 17

Paper accepted: “An Evaluation of Mobile End Devices in Multimedia Streaming Scenarios”

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Our paper with the title “An Evaluation of Mobile End Devices in Multimedia Streaming Scenarios” was accepted for publication at the First International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Networking (IWMMN 2010).

http://www.mobilware.org/cfp-iwmmn.shtml

Michael Ransburg, Mario Jonke, and Hermann Hellwagner, An Evaluation of Mobile End Devices in Multimedia Streaming Scenarios, accepted for publication at First International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Networking (IWMMN 2010), Chicago, USA, June 30, 2010.

Abstract:
This paper compares handhelds based on the iPhone and Android operating systems in multimedia streaming scenarios. We simulate typical Internet network impairments, i.e. packet delay and packet loss, and evaluate their effects on the end devices. Additional evaluations include bandwidth overhead inflicted by the different streaming approaches and traffic shape and fairness when both handhelds consume media simultaneously. Based on the quantitative evaluation, both approaches show weaknesses and strengths. A final qualitative discussion points out additional advantages for the streaming approach implemented in the iPhone operating system.

May 09

One of my photos was published in National Geographic Russia

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I usually do not blog about my photography, but everyone who knows me or follows me on Twitter knows that I’ve quite a passion for it. This time I make an exception, since it’s not every day that one of my photos gets published in National Geographic.

The photo below showing the “Lindwurm” (a monument in my home city Klagenfurt) was published in the April 2010 issue of National Geographic Russia. The photo is also available on my Flickr account, where the photo editor of National Geographic Russia originally found it.

Lindwurm Klagenfurt

Their photo editor contacted me some time ago. They were going to write a story on the Lindwurm in their April 2010 issue on “Fossil Countrymen”. The story is about how the Lindwurm came to be as a monument modeled after an animal skull of a woolly rhinoceros, an extinct mammal originally at home (not only) in Russia. At least, this is what I could translate from the original National Geographic article, which can be seen below.

I’m very happy that my photo was selected for this. Additionally, now I know how my name is written in Russian: МИХАЭЛЬ РАНСБУРГ :-)

If you want to take a look at my other photos, please visit my Flickr page!

May 05

International Workshop on Social, Adaptive and Personalized Multimedia Interaction and Access (SAPMIA 2010)

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Call for Papers

http://ir.ii.uam.es/sapmia2010/

++ OVERVIEW ++

In an effort to address and overcome some of these open issues  that hinder effective access and interaction of multimedia content,  this workshop will bring together individuals from a number of research communities, including but not limited to Multimedia Distribution and Access, Social Network Analysis, Multimedia Content Analysis, and User Modelling Adaptation and Personalization. It is our belief that a synergetic approach involving these areas of work can exceed their individual potentials, leading to improved access, understanding, and retrieval of multimedia content. The main objective of this workshop is to provide a forum to disseminate work that explicitly exploit the synergy between multimedia content analysis, personalisation, and next generation networking and community aspects of social networks. We believe that this integration could result on robust, personalized multimedia services, providing users with an improved multimedia experience.

In particular, user modelling and adaptation techniques can help alleviate the above problems by taking the user into consideration when accessing multimedia content. Information related to the user such as interests, current context or past interaction behaviour can provide additional valuable information that allows multimedia systems to better present, adapt, retrieve, or understand multimedia content. In addition, this workshop will also focus on the analysis of user networked communities, which can potentially provide richer and more structured information related to users and multimedia content. Hence, this workshop is distinct from and complementary to previous initiatives in that it involves the integration
multimedia content analysis techniques with information derived from users, networked communities, and context awareness.

++ TOPICS OF INTEREST ++
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

PERSONALIZATION AND ADAPTATIOIN OF MULTIMEDIA CONTENT
* Personalized access to multimedia content
* Multimedia content-based recommendation and collaborative filtering
* Interactive multimedia systems
* Semantic technologies for multimedia content personalization and adaptation
* Adaptive models for exploration of multimedia archives: adaptive browsing, collaborative search
* Adaptive user interfaces for multimedia browsing and searching
* Evaluation of adaptive multimedia systems

SOCIAL NETWORKS ON MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS
* Social networks analysis to multimedia content personalization and adaptation
* Multimedia interaction in networked communities
* Social multimedia applications (e.g. P2P applications, Multimedia broadcasting, social collections & networking, lifelogging)

DISTRIBUTED MEDIA
* Ubiquitous access to multimedia content and pervasive multimedia content delivery
* Interactive multimedia systems
* Techniques for robust and scalable distribution of multimedia content.
* Robust distribution of multimedia services over heterogeneous networks and access technologies

++ IMPORTANT DATES ++

Paper Submission: 10th June 2010
Notification of acceptance: 10th July 2010
Camera Ready Submission: 20th June 2010

- PAPER FORMAT & SUBMISSION

All the details can be found in: http://ir.ii.uam.es/sapmia2010/submissions.html
Accepted papers will be published together with the ACM Multimedia 2010 proceedings

May 04

Paper: “An adaptive system for real-time scalable video streaming with end-to-end QoS control”

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In the paper “An adaptive system for real-time scalable video streaming with end-to-end QoS control”, Beilu Shao et al. introduce and evaluate adaptation enabled by H.264/SVC.

Abstract:

This paper presents a real-time adaptive video streaming system based on the latest standardized video codec H.264/MPEG-4 AVC scalable extension (SVC). The system provides a full MPEG-21 media access framework over heterogeneous networks and terminals with end-to-end QoS control and multimedia adaptation based on SVC. This adaptive streaming system is composed of a server with a real-time SVC encoder, an adaptive network node, and a terminal with appropriate feedback of perceptual quality, network conditions and user preferences for adaptation support. The system facilitates a general content adaptation solution to achieve the end-to-end QoS control.

Link: http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/148589/files/Adaptation_Camera.pdf

If you are interested in more information on this topic, papers from our research group are available here, here, here and here – just to list a few.


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