Univ.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Martina Mara | November 20, 2018 | 13:00 | HS 2

Abstract:
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence entail many opportunities for humanity: From improving medical diagnoses to enabling greater autonomy for the elderly, from cleaning the house to optimizing energy efficiency. In the public discourse, however, smart technologies are customarily represented by the stereotypical image of the android, the artificial replication of the human being. Based on psychological findings, Mara argues that a human-centered approach towards technological development must foster new visions of complementary human-machine relationships instead of fueling fears of substitution. Furthermore, as many outside the expert circles still lack information about technical functions and feel uncomfortable with technology they don’t understand, there is a need for user empowerment: By explaining basic technological concepts to the public and by designing machines that are explainable themselves.

CV:
Prof. Martina Mara is a leading expert on human-robot relationships and head of the Robopsychology Lab at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Her team explores how autonomous machines should look like, behave, and communicate in order to establish comfortable interaction experiences for varying target groups. She earned her doctorate at the University of Koblenz-Landau’s Institute for Communication Psychology and Media Education with a dissertation on anthropomorphic machines. She regularly speaks at international conferences and she writes about social impacts of emerging technologies in her weekly tech column „Schöne neue Welt“ („Brave new world“). As a member of the Austrian Council for Robotics, she advices the Austrian government in establishing a strategy for the application of robotics and artificial intelligence.

Jorge Barbosa, PhD | November 22, 2018 | 2 pm | S.2.69

Abstract:
A heterogeneous system can be defined as a range of different system resources, which can be local or geographically distributed, that are utilized to execute computationally intensive applications. The efficiency of executing parallel applications on heterogeneous systems critically depends on the methods used to define an assignment and mapping of the workflow tasks onto resources.

Scheduling in this context is mainly divided into two main approaches: single and multiple QoS parameters. On the single QoS parameter, the execution time of a workflow application, also called makespan, has been the major concern in most of the scheduling strategies. In this talk, it will be presented a novel algorithm for time optimization that implements a look-ahead feature while keeping a quadratic time complexity.

The problem becomes more challenging when two or more QoS parameters are considered in the scheduling problem. Time, cost, energy and reliability are common QoS parameters considered in recent research work in this area. Many algorithms consider time and cost in their formulation but most of them perform: (a) optimization of one parameter constrained to the other; (b) optimization of both parameters in a bi-objective formulation; and (c) a consideration of an unlimited number of resources, in particular for cloud platforms, where the strategy to accomplish time constraints is by allocating new computational instances.

In this talk two low-time complexity algorithms for QoS based scheduling, bounded to a set of resources, will be addressed. Namely, a time optimization and budget constrained scheduling and a budget-deadline constrained scheduling algorithm.

Research topics on resource management of heterogeneous systems will be discussed, namely, energy-aware scheduling, auto-tuning and concurrent scheduling.

CV:
Jorge Barbosa obtained his MSc degree from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, in 1993, and the PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP), in 2001. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering at FEUP. He has (co-)authored over 60 scientific publications (including journal/conference papers and book chapters) on subjects related to parallel algorithms, resource management, energy-aware scheduling and performance modeling for heterogeneous systems. His current research interests are related to energy-aware scheduling, data locality, auto-parallelization tools and concurrent scheduling. He is member of the Editorial Board of Elsevier Journal „Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory“.

Dr. Michael Ortner | November 23, 2018 | 2 pm| L4.1.02 (IKT-LAB)

Abstract:
In the last decade, industrial fabrication of magnetic sensors has greatly improved producing ever cheaper and more reliable sensors. Consequently magnetic sensor systems have been developed for multiple applications that include current sensors, position and orientation sensors, compass applications, geomagnetic survey and others. Specific applications in modern automobiles include e.g. shift fork position detection, speed sensors, ABS sensors, steering wheel angle sensors, gas and break padel sensors and powertrain current sensors.

It is the aim of this lecture to provide a fundamental understanding of the working principles of such sensor systems and to discuss design difficulties. Computer aided design of magnetic sensor systems based on numerical methods and analytical implementations is discussed. Practical examples from industrial projects are shown.

CV:
Michael Ortner received the degree in theoretical physics from the Technical University of Vienna and the Ph.D. degree from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Innsbruck. In 2012, he started as a Researcher at the CTR Carinthian Tech Research AG Institute, working on magnetics and magnetic sensors with a focus on analytical approaches and numerical simulation.

Prof. Dr. Benjamin Rott | 8. November 2018 | 18:15 | Sterneckstraße 15, S.0.16 (Aula)

Kurzfassung:
In der Mathematikdidaktik wird das Problemlösen seit Pólyas „Schule des Denkens“ – mal mehr und mal weniger intensiv – thematisiert. Im Vortrag werden wichtige Ergebnisse entsprechender Forschung resümiert und es werden an konkreten Beispielen aktuelle Forschungsprojekte aus Deutschland erläutert, in denen es u. a. um Heurismen, ihre Wirksamkeit und Lehrbarkeit sowie um Problemlösen im Mathematikunterricht und in der Lehrerbildung geht.

Abschließend wird aus Sicht des Vortragenden beschrieben, wie nächste Schritte auf dem Gebiet der Problemlöseforschung aussehen könnten und sollten.

CV:
Benjamin Rott hat von 2001 bis 2006 Mathematik und Physik für das gymnasiale Lehramt in Oldenburg studiert und anschließend in Salzgitter das Referendariat absolviert. Von 2008 bis 2012 hat er an der Universität Hannover in Mathematikdidaktik promoviert und anschließend eine Postdoc-Stelle an der PH Freiburg angenommen. Von 2014 bis 2017 war Benjamin Rott Juniorprofessor an der Universität Duisburg-Essen und seit 2017 ist er Universitätsprofessor an der Universität zu Köln.
Die Forschungsschwerpunkte von Benjamin Rott sind das mathematische Problemlösen, Überzeugungen und Beliefs zur Mathematik sowie mathematische Begabung.

Dr. Thomas Stockhammer | November 30, 2018 | 11:00 | S.2.42

Abstract: The media landscape changes significantly over the last few years by new content formats, new service offerings, additional consumption devices and new monetization models. Think of Netflix, DAZN, Mediatheks, mobile devices, interactive content, smart TVs, Virtual and Augmented Reality, and so on. Many of these efforts have been realized by a limited usage of standards, but are standards irrelevant? Secondly, more and more services are enabled by latest mobile compute platforms enabling new services and experiences. This presentation will provide an overview some of these trends and will motivate the development of global interop standards. Specific aspects will include the move of linear TV services to the Internet (both mobile and fixed) as well recent advances on Extended Reality and immersive media trends.

Bio: Thomas Stockhammer received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees from the Munich University of Technology, Munich, Germany. Thomas was Visiting Researcher at Rensselear Politechnical Institute (RPI), Troy, NY, USA and University of California San Diego (UCSD), San Diego, CA, USA. After acting as cofounder and CEO of Novel Mobile Radio (NoMoR) Research for 10 years and a consultant for Siemens mobile, BenQ mobile, LG Electronics and Digital Fountain, he joined Qualcomm in 2014 as Director Technical Standards. In his different roles, he co-authored more than 200 research publications and more than 150 patents and 1000s of contributions to standardization efforts. In his day job, he is the active and has leadership and rapporteur positions in 3GPP, DVB, MPEG, IETF, ATSC, CTA, ETSI, VR Industry Forum and the DASH-Industry Forum in the area of multimedia communication, TV-distribution, content delivery protocols, immersive media representation and adaptive streaming. Among others, he leads the MPEG-I efforts in MPEG, he is the chair of the DASH-IF Technical working group, the rapporteur of the first completed 3GPP VR work as well as the chairman of the DVB CM-I group. Thomas also received the INCITS Technical Excellence Award 2013 for his MPEG DASH work and the 3GPP Excellence Ward 2017 for his work on Enhanced TV.

Dr. Ali Roshanghias | November 9, 2018 | 2:30 pm | L4.1.02 (IKT-LAB)

Abstract

In this talk the basics of micro and nano fabrication techniques will be covered. We will discuss in particular how they are carried out in a typical clean room environment. We will learn what are the differences between the front-end and back-end in MEMs microfabrication. There will be a bunch of technical terms in thin film and thick film processing of MEMS, which will be explained briefly.  We then follow up by describing the basics of the various fabrication steps such as thin film formation, lithography as well as etching. Some typical in-line and off-line characterization and testing techniques of thin films will also be introduced.

CV

Dr. Ali Roshanghias is currently a senior researcher and project manager in the field of MEMS packaging at CTR Carinthian Tech Research AG. He recieved his PhD in materials science and technology from Sharif university of technology, Iran at 2012. Afterwards he pursued his career as a post-doc fellow at Nagaoka university of technology, Japan and Vienna universtity, Austria in the field of electronic materials and packaging. In 2015 he joined the CTR Carinthian Tech Research, Austria as a material scientist in the field of heterogeneous integration technologies and MEMS/ Power packaging. He has published over 30 papers on materials synthesis and characterization and is a verified peer-reviewer of Elsevier science.

Dr. Paulo Mendes | October 17, 2018 | 10:00 | L4.1.114 – Lakeside Labs GmbH im B04.b.1

Abstract

„Today’s internet is being populated, in its fringes, by large number of devices that are wireless and/or cellular enabled. Despite the fact that such devices are often in the vicinity of each other, communication among them follows the end-to-end principle and as such, traditional data transmission approaches do not take advantage of the physical proximity of devices.

In the area of computer networks, the concept of cooperation has been applied to mitigate such effects, in different layers of the OSI stack. For instance, in wireless networks, cooperative networking techniques are being applied in OSI Layer 1 (based on diversity); in OSI Layer 2 (based on overhearing); in OSI Layer 3 (based on estimation); and in the above layers, for instance, as occurred with overlaying (e.g., P2P).

This talk is based on the research findings and contributions that the speaker has been doing to the field of cooperative networking. The talk will go over the sustainability of cooperative networking, by studying the inclusion of derived models, such as user-centric networking, in the Internet wholesale model, and by investigating the basic requirements for the success deployment of cooperative networking mechanisms, in terms of the incentives that devices need to have to participate in cooperative activities. From a pure networking perspective the talk will focus on cooperative networking mechanisms related to few-hop relaying and cooperative routing aiming to take advantage of any opportunity to communicate in intermittently connected wireless networks.

The talk will end with an overview of the research challenges to apply cooperative networking principles to the development of an Internet encompassing a huge number of embedded devices able to produce a large amount of data, where there are potential advantages in combining communication and computation in what is called in this talk “cooperative computing”. As example, the talk will focus on autonomic vehicle technology, which is being driven by advances in sensing, computing and networking technologies. On the one hand, autonomous driving on urban roads has seen significant progress in recent years. On the other hand, autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have received increasing interest to tackle several use-cases from environment monitoring and emergency situations, to relaying communications to isolated areas.“

Paulo Jorge Milheiro Mendes

Paulo has 20 years of experience as computer engineer and 7 years as coordinator of research teams. Paulo has an entrepreneurial spirit, with the ability to take an idea from beginning to end, while dealing with fast-moving deadlines. He has a team leadership profile with capability to gather innovation funding. In 2004 he got his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) degree in Informatics Engineering from the University of Coimbra, having performed his thesis as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York (2000 – 2003).  He started building his research carrier at NTT Docomo research Labs in Munich, Germany. After that we co-founded the Internet Architecture and Networking research group at INESCTEC in Oporto, Portugal (2007-2010), and the Cognitive and People Centric Computing Lab (2010 – ) in Lisbon, Portugal. His research interests are in the field of self-organised systems (e.g. swarm intelligence), cognitive networks (e.g. orchestration of distributed edge systems) and cooperative wireless networks (e.g. relaying, opportunistic networking, named-data networking). His skills include Internet protocols, wireless networks, software engineering, sensing systems, as well as programming (C, C++, Java) for Linux and Android systems. Paulo Mendes has more than 80 articles in journals, magazines, books and conference proceedings and his inventions have been protected by 14 international patents.

Prof. Maryline Hélard | September 5, 2018 | 15:00 | L4.1.01

Abstract

To meet growing demand for higher throughputs, advanced digital communication techniques based on multicarrier modulations, multiple antenna systems (MIMO) and their extension to massive MIMO (M-MIMO), powerful coding schemes or interference coordination are always under study and could be combined with solutions based on network densification and deployment of heterogeneous infrastructures.

For a number of years now,  IETR (Institut of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes) Labs has being developed strong expertise in communications systems with several experiments associating OFDM and MIMO in some proofs of concept.

In the first part of this talk, one of the classical precoding technique, known as Time Reversal applied to digital communications will be presented as well as its easy combination with OFDM. A second part will be dedicated to spatial modulation applied either at transmit or receive side and its possible application to IoT. For both systems, the benefit of using a high number of transmit antenna will be highlighted and a description of the proofs of concept implementation carried out in our labs provided.

The talk will then concentrate on the researches carried out with some of our PhD students on hybrid beamforming techniques, mmWave communications and VLC communications.

Bio

Professor Maryline Hélard received the M.Sc and PhD degrees from INSA Rennes and the Habilitation degree from Rennes 1 University in 1981, 1884 and 2004 respectively. In 1985, she joined France Telecom as a research engineer and since 1991 she has been studying physical layer in the field of digital television and wireless communications. In 2007, she joined the National Institute of Applied Science (INSA) as a professor and she is now the co-director of the Signal and 2018 Communications department of IETR (Electronics and Telecommunications Institute of Rennes). She is co-author of more than 140 technical papers including 37 journal papers and of 30 patents. Her current research interests are in the areas of digital communications such as MIMO techniques, large MIMO, OFDM, MC-CDMA, channel estimation, equalization, spatial modulations and iterative processing applied to wireless communications and more recently to wire communications (ADSL, optical). She was involved in several collaborative research projects including digital television, MC-CDMA techniques, time reversal and spatial modulation.

Prof. Jean-François Hélard | September 5, 2018 | 14:00 | L4.1.01

Abstract

OFDM multicarrier techniques are widely deployed in most wireless communication systems, in particular in cellular networks (LTE, LTE Advanced, 5G…), broadcast networks (DVB-T, DVB-T2, ATSC3.0…) and WiFi networks. However, multi-carrier modulations are characterized by a very large dynamic amplitude measured by the Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR). This large amplitude prevents radio frequency designers to feed the signal at the optimal point of the non linear High Power Amplifier (HPA) which reduces their energy efficiency and then increases dramatically the overall base station consumption. In literature, the PAPR reduction and the  linearization techniques are the main approaches to solve this HPA efficiency problem in cellular and broadcast networks

In recent years, tone reservation (TR) PAPR reduction techniques have been deeply studied and included for example in the DVB-T2 and the new American digital video broadcasting (ATSC 3.0) standards. It is based on a gradient iterative approach where, at each iteration, a predefined kernel is used to reduce one peak in the time domain. During this talk, we will present novel TR PAPR reduction techniques, namely grouped individual carrier allocation for multiple peaks (GICMP) based on a new kernel signal and fully compatible with the new broadcasting DVB-T2 and ATSC3.0 standards. An in-depth performance analysis based on simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the novel proposed PAPR reduction algorithm offers very good performance/complexity/latency trade-off.

In the second part of this talk, we will present intelligent solution for future implementations to control the reduction of PAPR and the linearization steps in a flexible way according to some predefined parameters so that they become adaptive and self-configurable. More specifically, our work focused on the analytical analysis of in-band measured by the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) and out-of-band distortions measured by the Adjacent Chanel Power Ratio (ACPR) for multicarrier signals taking into account the PAPR reduction, the impact of non-linear amplification, the memory effects and the predistortion. Combining those complementary approaches, the power efficiency of the transmitters with OFDM multicarrier waveforms can be highly upgraded and/or the energy consumption reduced by 10 to 15 %

Bio

Professor Hélard received his Dipl.-Ing. and his Ph.D in electronics and signal processing from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Rennes in 1981 and 1992 respectively. From 1982 to 1997, he was research engineer and then head of channel coding for the digital broadcasting research group at France Telecom Research Center (Orange Labs) in Rennes. In 1997, he joined INSA Rennes, which is one of the « Grandes Ecoles » in France, where he is today Full Professor, Classe Exceptionelle, which is the highest rank. He was Director of Research of INSA Rennes during 3 years  from december 2010 to december 2013. He was also during 8 years Deputy Director of the Rennes Institute for Electronics and Telecommunications (IETR, UMR CNRS 6164), which is an academic research laboratory of 400 people, created in 2002 in association with the CNRS. His research interests lie in signal processing techniques for digital communications, such as space-time and channel coding, multi-carrier modulation, as well as multi-user communications and cross-layer techniques, power efficient and PAPR reduction techniques.  He is involved in several European and national research projects in the fields of digital video terrestrial broadcasting, mobile radio communications and cellular networks, power-line and ultra-wide-band communications, cooperative communications and relaying techniques. Prof. J-F. Hélard is a senior member of IEEE, author and co-author of more than 270 technical papers in international scientific journals and conferences, and holds 15 European patents.

The review of the TEWI colloquium of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jörn Ostermann from July 12, 2018 comprises the slides (below) and video here.

Abstract: We present a comparison between AV1, HEVC and JEM. It reveals that professionally optimized AV1 encoding software is about 32 times as complex as the HEVC encoder software HM. Given the wide attention that AV1 receives and the plans of Google and Facebook to actually use AV1 in commercial environments, the complexity constraints endured during the HEVC development seem to disappear. We present recent results on contour-based prediction for intra coding, a KLT depending on scene and intra prediction direction for coding the prediction error and texture synthesis to replace conventional texture coding for uniform parts of images. Especially contour-based prediction and texture synthesis depend heavily on computer vision algorithms. While typically failures of efficient prediction can be compensated by coding the prediction error and hence a higher data rate, texture synthesis in video coding does not have this safety leash.

Bio: Jörn Ostermann studied Electrical Engineering and Communications Engineering at the University of Hannover and Imperial College London, respectively. He received Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. from the University of Hannover in 1988 and 1994, respectively. From 1988 till 1994, he worked as a Research Assistant at the Institut für Theoretische Nachrichtentechnik conducting research in low bit-rate and object-based analysis-synthesis video coding. In 1994 and 1995 he worked in the Visual Communications Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs on video coding. He was a member of Image Processing and Technology Research within AT&T Labs – Research from 1996 to 2003. Since 2003 he is Full Professor and Head of the Institut für Informationsverarbeitung at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. Since 2008, he is the Chair of the Requirements Group of MPEG (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 WG11). Jörn was a scholar of the German National Foundation. In 1998, he received the AT&T Standards Recognition Award and the ISO award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (class of 2005). Joern served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society (2002/2003). He published more than 100 research papers and book chapters. He is coauthor of a graduate level text book on video communications. He holds more than 30 patents.