Keynotes & Plenary Talks

Multimedia Computing - How Computers and Humans Can Learn from Each Other

Prof. Dr. Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract

In the past decades, multimedia computing invloved the creation, processing, storage and distribution of audio and visual content. Advances in wireless network technologies and increasing capabilities of mobile devices enabled us to make multimedia computing mobile. The most recent trend to be observed is the digitalization of all types of media, involving and addressing all human senses, e.g. haptic / tactile input and output modalities, enhancing multimedia experience with olfactoric stimuli or even directly connecting computers to human brain activity. In the first part of this talk, we are going to reflect on the impact of this new notion of multimedia in many application domains. We will argue towards the need for rich media interaction, i.e. going beyond the classical multimedia formats of audio and video. We will highlight the importance of considering QoS in service development and deployment leading to a high level of user satisfaction. In the second part of this talk, we will critically reflect potential downsides of those trends, ranging from well known concerns about security and privacy to problems of information overload and the risk of prefering digital instead of human communication. We will illustrate how multisensory/multimedia computing can help humans in extending their perceptional capabilites, i.e. how humans can learn and benefit from computers, but also what is needed so that computers better understand and learn from humans. The talk should end in a discussion on what we as the scientific community in computer science, can and should do to ensure beneficial and sustainable advances in technology.

Biography

Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis is holding a full professor position in computer science at Johannes Kepler Universit‰t Linz. She is chairing the Department of Telecooperation with a research focus in mobile computing, multimedia and hypermedia systems as well as cooperative and collaborative systems. Research in those areas includes the investigation of methods, techniques and tools for system development as well as evaluation and analysis with focus on performance evaluation. The Department is participating in numerous national and international projects, including CRUISE, a European network of excellence in sensor networks, EuroFGI, a network of excellence on Future Generation Internet, the AustrianGrid project, or ModelCVS a project on semantics in SW and system modelling, and actively involved in the organisation of international conferences, including for example iiWAS and MoMM. Prof. Anderst-Kotsis is author of numerous publications in international conferences and journals and is co-editor of several books. She is currently Member at large of ACM.

The Web of Scholars

Prof. Dr. Feng Xia, Dalian University of Technology, China

Abstract

Scholarly data of various types are growing rapidly in all scientific disciplines. The availability of these data makes it possible to profile scholars in numerous dimensions, discover relationships between scholars, and understand the dynamics of science. In particular, scholarly big data is leading to the emergence of the web of scholars. In this era of a small world, almost all scholars are connected, directly or indirectly. While some connections between scholars might be visible/explicit in, e.g., co-authorship networks, other connections might be invisible/implicit. Generally, social networks of scholars could be derived from analysis and mining of scholarly big data. Understanding the structure and dynamics of the web of scholars gives rise to a lot of potentials as well as challenges. This talk will look into recent advances in this field, showcase some solutions for addressing relevant challenges, and discuss potential applications.

Biography

Dr. Feng Xia is currently a Full Professor in School of Software, Dalian University of Technology (DUT), China. He is founding Director of The Alpha Lab (http://thealphalab.org/) and Associate Dean (Research) of School of Software. He is/was on the Editorial Boards of over 10 intíl journals. He has served as the General Chair, Program Committee Chair, Workshop Chair, or Publicity Chair of over 30 intíl conferences and workshops. He is also the Guest Editor of over 10 journal special issues and a (founding) organizer of several conferences. Dr. Xia has authored/co-authored two books, over 200 scientific papers in intíl journals and conferences (such as IEEE TC, TMC, TBD, TCSS, TPDS, TETC, THMS, TVT, TII, TIE, IEEE/ACM TON, ACM TOMM, WWW, JCDL, MobiCom, and INFOCOM) and 3 book chapters. He has an h-index of 37, an i10-index of 134, and a total of more than 5400 citations to his work according to Google Scholar. His name has been included on Elsevierís Most Cited Chinese Researchers for four consecutive years (2014-2017; ever since its inaugural version). Dr. Xia received a number of prestigious awards, including WWW 2017 Best Demo Award, IEEE DataCom 2017 Best Paper Award, and IEEE UIC 2013 Best Paper Award. His research interests include computational social science, network science, data science, and mobile social networks. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, and a Member of AAAS. URL: http://fengxia.net/

ICT as an Enabler for a Society where No One is Left Behind,

Prof. A Min Tjoa, Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Abstract

The United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development was unanimously adopted by all its 193 heads of member states or their representatives. As pointed out by Deputy UN Secretary General Jan Eliasson "No-one should be left behind" is the ethical imperative of this development agenda. The agenda consists of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets.
Unfortunately not even one of the (SDGs) is dedicated to ICT or Digitalization. Explicitly only four targets out of the 169 targets of the SDGs can be directly assigned to ICT. Prima facie the potential impact of ICT and digitalization is very underestimated in the text of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. This talk is aiming at delivering strong arguments on ICT’s significant role to contribute the necessary efforts to reach the very ambitious 2030 SDG-goals.

Biography

A Min Tjoa is a full professor for Software Technology at TU WIEN (Vienna University of Technology) at the Institute for Information Systems Engineering since 1994. He was guest professor at the University of Zurich, the Technical University in Lausanne, Czech Technical University in Prague, University of Linz, University of Klagenfurt, National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo) and the University of Kyushu. He has been elected to Chairperson of UN-CSTD for the period 2018/2019 being its vice-chairperson from 2015 to 2018. Currently, he holds also the position of an executive-chairperson at the Austrian National Competence Center for Excellent Technologies (COMET- Competence Center for Excellent Technology) in the field of IT-Security (SBA). He is also Chief Scientific Officer of the COMET-Center for Software and Data Science (SCCH). Since 2012, he has been member of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) and is currently its Honorary Secretary. He is also the chairperson of the IFIP-Working Group on "Enterprise Information Systems". In 2018 he was the General Chairperson for SOFSEM (44th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science), the ICDCS 2018 (38th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems) and Program Committee Chair of CONFENIS 2018 (12th IFIP International Conference on Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems). He has been awarded the Honorary Doctoral degree (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the Czech University of Technology in Prague for his research work and the Honorary Professor title from Hue University, Vietnam. He has published more than 250 peer reviewed articles in journals and conferences. His main research interests are in Business Intelligence, Semantic Web, IT-Security & Privacy, Linked Open Data and ICT for SDGs.