True immersion into a distant environment and efficient distributed collaboration require the ability to physically interact with remote objects and to literally get in touch with other people. Touching and manipulating objects remotely becomes possible if we augment traditional audiovisual communications by the haptic modality. Haptic communications is a relatively young field of research that has the potential to substantially improve human–human and human–machine interaction.

In this talk, we address perceptual coding of haptic information and the transmission of haptic data streams over resource-constrained and potentially lossy networks. In this context, we also briefly discuss the need for objective quality metrics for haptic communication. Throughout the talk, we stress the fact that haptic communications is not meant as a replacement of traditional audiovisual communications but rather as an additional dimension for telepresence that will allow us to advance in our quest for truly immersive communication.

Brief Biography:

Eckehard Steinbach (IEEE M’96, SM’08) studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), the University of Essex (Great Britain), and ESIEE in Paris. From 1994 until 2000 he was a member of the research staff of the Image Communication Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany), where he received the Engineering Doctorate in 1999. From February 2000 to December 2001 he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Information Systems Laboratory of Stanford University. In February 2002 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology of Munich University of Technology (Germany), where he is currently a Full Professor for Media Technology. His current research interests are in the area of audio-visual-haptic information processing and communication as well as networked and interactive multimedia systems.

Abstract:

Fastest is a tool that assist software engineers in generating test cases from Z specifications. It provides tool support for a method of model-based testing know as the Test Template Framework. The tool reads a Z specification written in LaTeX markup and waits for commands from the user. Users can apply testing tactics to partition the input space of Z operations thus creating testing trees. Later they can prune these trees to eliminate unsatisfiable test specifications. In a third step, a satisfiability algorithm can be run to find a test case for each leaf in a testing tree. Finally, it is possible to refine these test cases into programs to test the implementation of the Z specification. In this talk I will show how Fastest works on some toy examples and our current research efforts.

Bio:

Maximiliano Cristiá is professor of Software Engineering at Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and head of the Software Engineering Group at CIFASIS (International Franco-Argentine Center for Information Sciences and Systems). His research interests include formal methods, particularly model-based testing, software architecture and tool development for the Software Engineer.

Die Ringvorlesung Informatik wendet sich an DissertantInnen, an angehende DissertantInnen (derzeit DiplomandInnen), an alle interessierten MitarbeiterInnen der Forschungsgruppen der Informatik und Informationstechnik sowie allgemein an aktueller Informatik-Forschung interessierte Personen.

In acht Vorträgen (Horster, Elmenreich, Timmerer, Bollin, Liddle, Ahlström, Bettstetter und Kyamakya) werden Vertreter der Informatik und Informationstechnik ausgewählte aktuelle Forschungsarbeiten vorstellen und mit den DoktorandInnen vertiefen.

Ziele:

• Die HörerInnen sollen Ein- und Überblicke zu aktuellen Forschungsfragen, -methoden und -projekten in der Informatik und Informationstechnik erhalten.
• Die DissertantInnen sollen ihren Standort in ihrem eigenen Dissertationsvorhaben bestimmen, d.h. sich ihr(e) Forschungsgebiet, -fragen, -ziele und -methoden klar machen und dokumentieren.
• Die DissertantInnen sollen Querbezüge zu einem der in den Vorträgen dargestellten „fremden“ Forschungsgebiete identifizieren, Anknüpfungspunkte und möglichen Nutzen herausarbeiten, Kontakt zu dem entsprechenden Vortragenden herstellen, die Querbezüge mit ihm diskutieren und in Form der Bearbeitung eines kleinen „Projekts“ vertiefen.
• Die DissertantInnen sollen all dies (Dissertationsvorhaben, Standort, Querbezüge und möglicher Nutzen, „Projekte“ und Ergebnisse bzw. Erkenntnisse daraus) abschließend den anderen DissertantInnen und den Vortragenden präsentieren und mit ihnen darüber diskutieren.
• Damit sollen letztlich die beteiligten Forschungsgruppen einander besser kennenlernen, die Kontakte intensiviert, Querbezüge identifiziert und mögliche Kooperationen initiiert werden können. Die DissertantInnen sollen erkennen, ob/dass sie in anderen Forschungsgruppen Unterstützung bekommen können.

Themen:

• 14.3.2012: Horster: „Entscheidungsprobleme: Phänomene – Reduktionen – Algorithmen„
• 28.3.2012: Elmenreich: „Komplexe Systeme„
• 18.4.2012: Timmerer: „QoE beyond Audio-Visual: Sensory Experience„
• 2.5.2012: Bollin: „Comprehension-Techniken am Beispiel formaler Z-Spezifikationen„
• 16.5.2012: Liddle: „A Conceptual-Modeling Approach to Data Extraction„
• 30.5.2012: Ahlström: „Interaction on „off-screen space“: Design possibilities and challenges„
• 13.6.2012: Bettstetter: „Selbstorganisierende Synchronisation„
• 27.6.2012: Kyamakya: „The Potential of Neuro-Computing for Enabling „Real-Time“ Computational Engineering„

Der Rückblick zum TEWI-Kolloquium von Oge Marques, Florida Atlantic University am 24.01.2012 beinhaltet die Videoaufzeichnung sowie die Folien:

Video

[iframe height=“350″ src=“https://video.aau.at/video.php?video=ftf_marques.mp4″]

Slides

Abstract

Mobile Visual Search (MVS) is a fascinating research field with many open challenges and opportunities which have the potential to impact the way we organize, annotate, and retrieve visual data (images and videos) using mobile devices. This talk is structured in four parts:

(i) MVS — opportunities: where I present recent and relevant numbers of the mobile computing market, particularly in the field of photography apps, social networks, and mobile search.

(ii) Basic concepts: where I explain the basic MVS pipeline and discuss the three main MVS scenarios and associated challenges.

(iii) Advanced technical details: where I explain technical aspects of feature extraction, indexing, descriptor matching, and geometric verification, discuss the state of the art in these fields, and comment on open problems and research opportunities.

(iv) Examples and applications: where I show recent and significant examples of academic research (e.g., Stanford Product Search System) and commercial apps (e.g., Google Goggles, oMoby, kooaba) in this field.

Der Rückblick zum TEWI-Kolloquium von Prof. Pascal Felber, Univ. Neuchatel, Schweiz am 19.01.2012 beinhaltet die Videoaufzeichnung sowie die Folien:

Video

[iframe height=“350″ src=“https://video.aau.at/video.php?video=ftf_felber.mp4″]

Slides

Abstract

This talk will present SPLAY, an integrated system that facilitates the design, deployment and testing of large-scale distributed applications. Unlike existing systems, SPLAY covers all aspects of the development and evaluation chain. It allows developers to express algorithms in a concise, simple language that highly resembles pseudo-code found in research papers. The execution environment has low overheads and footprint, and provides a comprehensive set of libraries for common distributed systems operations. SPLAY is freely available from https://www.splay-project.org/.

Der Rückblick zum TEWI-Kolloquium von Christian Beecks, RWTH Aachen am 10.01.2012 beinhaltet die Videoaufzeichnung sowie die Folien:

Video

[iframe height=“350″ src=“https://video.aau.at/video.php?video=ftf_beecks.mp4″]

Slides

Abstract:

With the growing amount of images, videos, and music, the task to support users in exploring multimedia databases is of ever-increasing importance. That is why numerous content-based browsing approaches have been developed. They support users in searching and browsing for multimedia objects in an interactive and playful way. In terms of query performance, however, these browsing approaches are frequently limited to small-to-moderate size databases. The question of how to efficiently browse large-scale multimedia databases yet remains to be answered.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of efficient query processing techniques applicable to content-based browsing systems. To this end, I will first introduce the domain of adaptive distance-based similarity measures and show how to model image similarity in a flexible way. I will then present recent developments for efficient exploration query processing by means of similarity-based visualizations and metric indexing. Finally, I will show how to browse millions of multimedia objects in a few seconds.

Abstract:  

Mobile Visual Search (MVS) is a fascinating research field with many open challenges and opportunities which have the potential to impact the way we organize, annotate, and retrieve visual data (images and videos) using mobile devices. This talk is structured in four parts:
(i) MVS — opportunities: where I present recent and relevant numbers of the mobile computing market, particularly in the field of photography apps, social networks, and mobile search.

(ii) Basic concepts: where I explain the basic MVS pipeline and discuss the three main MVS scenarios and associated challenges.

(iii) Advanced technical details: where I explain technical aspects of feature extraction, indexing, descriptor matching, and geometric verification, discuss the state of the art in these fields, and comment on open problems and research opportunities.

(iv) Examples and applications: where I show recent and significant examples of academic research (e.g., Stanford Product Search System) and commercial apps (e.g., Google Goggles, oMoby, kooaba) in this field.

Dr. Oge Marques is an Associate Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. He is currently a guest professor with ITEC at Klagenfurt University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Florida Atlantic University in 2001, his Masters in Electronics Engineering from Philips International Institute / Eindhoven University of Technology (Eindhoven, NL) in 1989 and his Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from UTFPR (Curitiba, Brazil), where he also taught for more than 10 years before moving to the USA. He has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students for more than 20 years. His research experience has been mostly in the fields of image processing and computer vision. He is the (co-) author of four books in these topics, including the recently released textbook „Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB“ (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2011). He is a Senior Member of both the IEEE and the ACM.

This talk will present SPLAY, an integrated system that facilitates the design, deployment and testing of large-scale distributed applications. Unlike existing systems, SPLAY covers all aspects of the development and evaluation chain. It allows developers to express algorithms in a concise, simple language that highly resembles pseudo-code found in research papers. The execution environment has low overheads and footprint, and provides a comprehensive set of libraries for common distributed systems operations. SPLAY is freely available from https://www.splay-project.org/.

CV: Pascal Felber received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. From 1998 to 2002, he has worked at Oracle Corporation and Bell-Labs (Lucent Technologies) in the USA. From 2002 to 2004, he has been an Assistant Professor at Institut EURECOM in France. Since October 2004, he is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, working in the field of dependable and distributed systems. He has published over 80 research papers in various journals and conferences.