In the “Research” section you can find new demo videos about some tools developed during my research activities. Check it out now!

In case you are looking for a master thesis topic at Klagenfurt University in the research area of multimedia systems, please contact me! I’ve plenty of new and interesting topics!

Our review-paper “Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review” is officially out now (Mar. 16) by the online journal SPIE Reviews, Vol. 1!

Read it here.

After having some troubles at Beijing Airport due to heavy snowstorms (newspaper reported that since half a century it has not been that cold and that much snow in this area of China) I am finally here in Beibei district of Chongqing in a great hotel (Haiyu Spring Hotel). The Multimedia Modeling Conference (MMM) 2010 started yesterday with an interesting keynote about “Slow Intelligence System”, held by Prof. Shi-Kuo Chang from Pittsburgh, USA. A lot of interesting papers (of high quality) have been presented already, I am looking forward to tomorrow’s session about “Semantic Video Concepts”. Another highlight was yesterday’s “HotPot Dinner”, a specialty of Chongqing!

This year the Austria Presse Agentur (APA) has organized a challenge for innovative IT technologies for the presentation and management of content. Prizes for two categories have been awarded: Start-ups and Academia. I am very happy to be the winner of the APA-IT Challenge 2009 in the Academia category, with the Video Explorer! See my presentation slides of the competition or watch the video of the awarding (unfortunately, in German only).

The IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo is over for this year. Is has been held at the Waldorf=Astoria hotel in NYC. The venue was great! Unfortunately, many people did not come to present their papers, especially people from China. Thus, several presentations had to be canceled. At most I liked the presentations of the Internet Multimedia Search and Mining workshop, chaired by Marcel Worring.

I have finally come to a happy end…
Yesterday, I have successfully defended my dissertation, which can be read here!
It’s a really good feeling to have finished it!

I have found an interesting quote on Wikipedia:

It is generally acknowledged that visual search into video does not work well and that no company is using it publicly. Researchers at UC San Diego and Carnegie Melon University have been working on the visual search problem for more than 15 years, and admitted at a “Future of Search” conference at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2007 that it was years away from being viable even in simple search.

The Content-Based Multimedia Indexing workshop in 2009 is over now. It was a small but nice workshop, held in Chania, Crete. One of the most interesting presentations for me was surely the talk of Alan Smeaton about Biometric Responses to Music-Rich Segments in Films: The CDVPlex. In short, they build up an own cinema-like environment for watching movies and measured biometric responses of subjects during watching the films in order to find out which emotions were caused by specific scenes and if several subjects share the same emotions at these scenes. The results might be very interesting for video summarization research…

On Wednesday, 20th of May 2009, the “Business Run” over a distance of 4.8 km took place in Klagenfurt. ITEC participated with three teams and scored quite well. See here. Pictures can be found here (thanks to Martina!).