Thursday, December 18, 2025 | 10:00 a.m. | Room: S.2.69 | University of Klagenfurt

Dr. Hadi Amirpourazarian | Department of Information Technology

Abstract: Video coding is the beating heart of multimedia communication, and despite decades of innovation, it remains a field full of challenges and opportunities. While much research continues to push codec-level efficiency, this talk shifts the perspective to video streaming: how smart decisions about encoding parameters can dramatically boost real-world delivery performance. We explore how content-adaptive bitrate ladders unlock substantial efficiency gains by tailoring encoding settings to each video’s unique characteristics, and how optimizing bitrate, resolution, and frame rate can balance conflicting goals such as visual quality, delivery cost, and energy consumption. We then dive into how these strategies can be brought to life in live streaming using powerful video-complexity analysis frameworks. Finally, we reveal how real-time quality measurement enables intelligent, responsive streaming systems that elevate video delivery and monitoring to a new level.

Bio: Hadi Amirpour is working on adaptive video streaming, image/video compression, QoE evaluation, 3D and immersive imaging, and machine-learning-based medical image analysis, with a focus on translating theory into next-generation multimedia systems. He has received multiple distinctions, including Best Paper Awards (PCS 2024, NAB 2025) and Grand Challenge wins at ICIP 2024 and VCIP 2025. He contributes to JPEG Pleno and MPEG standardization on light fields, point clouds, and immersive formats, and has co-chaired Qualinet Task Force 7 since 2021, advancing subjective and objective video quality assessment. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE TCSVT and holds key leadership roles such as TPC Co-Chair of VCIP 2025 and General Co-Chair of QoMEX 2026 and MMSP 2027. He is also active in organizing special sessions, workshops, and tutorials at major venues, including IEEE ICME, IEEE QoMEX, ACM Multimedia, VQEG, EUVIP, and ACM MobiSys.

TEWI Colloquium

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Oliver Hohlfeld | Head of the Distributed Systems group | University of Kassel
Friday, November 14, 2025, at 02:00 p.m. @ S.1.37 | University of Klagenfurt

Abstract: DDoS attacks are one of the currently most pressing cybersecurity problems. In these attacks, attackers flood their targets with unwanted traffic to exhaust the available resources, e.g., bandwidth. Over time, DDoS attack volumes became record-hitting terabit-level attacks that can even challenge the largest networks on the Internet. In this talk, we focus on exploring the types of attack vectors, including booter services that enable everyone to launch attacks, and present mitigation techniques that can be employed within IXPs.

Short CV: I’m a Professor at the University of Kassel, where I head the Distributed Systems group. Before, I was a professor at Brandenburg University of Technology and headed the Computer Networks group. Prior to that, I was at RWTH Aachen University, and before that, I was with Anja Feldmann at TU Berlin / Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories. I was a visiting scholar at the group of Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.

I studied computer science at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Institut Eurecom (Sophia Antipolis, France), and Darmstadt University of Technology, and hold a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree. From 2004 to 2006, I worked at Fraunhofer IGD, where I focused on developing network architectures for telemedical applications. I obtained a Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from TU Berlin in 2013 (Advisor: Anja Feldmann).

I am a Senior Member of the ACM.

Website: https://www.ohohlfeld.com/

TEWI Colloquium

Assoc. Prof. Amila Akagic | Faculty of Electrical Engineering | University of Sarajevo

Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 02:00 p.m. @ S.1.42 | University of Klagenfurt

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is now an omnipresent term across many, if not all, disciplines. Many stakeholders are motivated to adopt it in order to stay competitive. Interdisciplinary research is particularly affected, as researchers and practitioners come together to explore how AI can be applied effectively to diverse problems. Many companies have already collected vast amounts of data that they do not yet know how to use. This presentation provides an overview of selected projects that illustrate applications in biomedical imaging, plant phenotyping, materials informatics, natural language processing, and accelerated hardware. The aim is to demonstrate how advanced AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing can bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world impact.

Bio: Prof. Dr. Amila Akagic is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Informatics at the University of Sarajevo. Her primary areas of interest are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, Image Processing, and Digital Signal Processing. 

TEWI Colloquium

Prof. Qing Xu | College of Intelligence and Computing |  Tianjin University – China

Thursday, July 17, 2025 at 02:00 p.m. @ S.2.37 | University of Klagenfurt

Abstract: Visual scanning and gaze behavior are fundamental to everyday sensorimotor activities such as walking and driving. The coordination of the eyes and head plays a foundational role in visual scanning, and a deep understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of this coordination is undoubtedly important. However, relatively little is known about the computational and higher-order interactions between eye and head movements during visual scanning in sensorimotor tasks. Moreover, eye gaze directly reflects attention and its allocation. Data-driven measurements of gaze behavior provide a quantitative assessment of visual attention, revealing the mental and physical states of individuals. Situational awareness offers a robust and semantically rich framework for interpreting gaze behavior during sensorimotor activities. Nevertheless, few works have measured eye gaze data specifically from the perspective of situational awareness.

In this talk, I will present two closely related studies. In the first part, we apply a recent information-theoretic tool, Partial Information Decomposition (PID), to quantify higher-order components — uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy — in the spatiotemporal interactions between eye movements and head motion time series during a VR/AR-based walking experience. To our knowledge, this is the first data-driven approach leveraging an information-theoretic framework to characterize higher-order interactions in eye–head coordination during sensorimotor activities. In the second part, we propose four novel computational measures of gaze behavior grounded in the concept of situational awareness. These measures effectively assess the efficiency of visual scanning and sensorimotor performance, exemplified here using a driving task. Our results demonstrate that the proposed measures are effective and outperform closely related existing methods.

Bio: His current research focuses on the application of theoretical tools in information theory and complexity systems, based on employing VR/AR techniques. Since 2018, he has been doing interdisciplinary research relevant to data-driven analysis and modeling of human behavior in a computational manner, mainly based on using eye gaze and behavioral data (including head motion data, muscle data, and so on) and employing probability and information theoretic tools. In a nutshell, he does research related to understanding, explaining and modeling of human behavior (eye gaze and eye movement), by the exploitation of theoretical tools, mainly in information theory and complexity systems. He utilizes and extends the latest Partial Information Decomposition (PID) and Assembly Theory (AT), from the perspective of higher-order interactions of complex systems. Also, he works on low-level signal (image/video) processing, visualization and Monte Carlo adaptive sampling based image synthesis.

More information:  https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=qg6D4doAAAAJ&view_op=list_works .

TEWI Colloquium

Prof. Tullio Vardanega | University of Padua

Monday, July 21, 2025 at 02:00 p.m. @ B01.0.204 | Lakeside Park |  University of Klagenfurt

Abstract: This talk focuses on the teaching of programming from an angle arguably applicable to any level of training, the more fully, the more advanced the level. Said angle is inspired by two sources, seemingly different from each other, but featuring very clear points of contact:

(1) the understanding of how learning works; and

(2) the transposition of some powerful practices of Software Engineering into

the instructional design of programming education.

The spinal cord of this talk is the idea that learning requires “reconciling with errors

to be able to leverage from them”.

Bio: Tullio Vardanega holds an MSc from the University of Pisa, IT (1986), and a PhD from the Technical University of Delft, NL, 1998. After working as PI for an R&D firm at Pisa between 1987 and 1991, he moved to the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, where he stayed until the end of 2001. Since January 2002, he is at the University of Padua, IT. Owing to his fabric of industrial and academic contacts, he has run numerous collaborative projects on international and national research funding. In addition to being a long-time member of IEEE and ACM, he is the Italian delegate in technical expert groups of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22: WG9 (Ada) and WG23 (Programming Language Vulnerabilities). From February 2004 until February 2024, he was the chairperson of Ada-Europe. He now is the chair of the Ada User Society that oversees the continuation of Ada as international standard.