Omar Aziz Niamut | TNO | May 10, 2016 | 16:30 | Seeparkhotel (co-located with mmsys2016.itec.aau.at)

Abstract: This talk presents the Spatial Representation Description (SRD) feature of the second amendment of MPEG DASH standard part 1, 23009-1:2014. SRD is an approach for streaming only spatial sub-parts of a video to display devices, in combination with the form of adaptive multi-rate streaming that is intrinsically supported by MPEG DASH. The SRD feature extends the Media Presentation Description (MPD) of MPEG DASH by describing spatial relationships between associated pieces of video content. This enables the DASH client to select and retrieve only those video streams at those resolutions that are relevant to the user experience. The paper describes the design principles behind SRD, the different possibilities it enables and examples of how SRD was used in different experiments on interactive streaming of ultra-high resolution video.

Bio: Omar Aziz Niamut is a senior research scientist at the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), working on shared interactive and immersive media delivery. He received MSc. (2001) and PhD. (2006) degrees from Delft university of Technology. In 2007, he advised and reported to the European Parliament and the European Commission on the harmonisation of mobile TV. From 2008-2010, he made over 300 standardization contributions to ETSI TISPAN and advised the Singapore government on the use of IPTV standards. In 2007, he was the technical lead for one of the world’s first user trial of social TV services and in 2014, he led a joint effort with the BBC towards the world’s first live tiled streaming of UHD video to end users. He has been active as work package lead in EU FP7 projects FascinatE, STEER and EXPERIMEDIA. He has presented at international industry events such as Broadband Home Forum, International Broadcast Convention, IPTV Seminar and IPTV World Forum, NEM Summit and Future Internet Assembly. He is an expert reviewer for the IWT funded iMinds ICON programme and a NEM ETP Steering Board member. He is author of multiple journal papers and conference publications in the fields of audio coding, interactive IPTV services and immersive media, filed 20 patent applications, contributed a chapter to a book on Social TV and co-edited a book on format-agnostic media. He has been serving as Co-chair and main organizer of the WSICC workshop 2013 and 2015, the workshop series (2013, 2014) on cross-breeding social networks and networked media in the Future Internet, and has been appointed as General Co-chair for ACM TVX 2017, the prime venue for publishing research related to TV and online video experiences.

Ali C. Begen | IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer | May 10, 2016 | 15:30 | Seeparkhotel (co-located with mmsys2016.itec.aau.at)

Abstract: Watching video over the Web is without a doubt the most popular way to access both free and premium content on connected devices for all kinds of consumers from novices to professionals. The underlying technology, called HTTP adaptive streaming, is quite straightforward; however, it does not always result in the most pleasant viewer experience due to quality fluctuations. This can cause dissatisfaction for consumers, leading to revenue loss for providers in both managed and unmanaged video services. In this talk, we will explain a new approach to adaptive streaming that we refer to as content-aware streaming. This is not just another adaptive streaming algorithm but a completely untraditional streaming toolset that enables premium viewer experience with minimal cost to the provider. After we briefly cover what solutions have been proposed for existing problems, and what worked and did not work for consumers and providers, we take a stab at clarifying some of the recent public announcements that have been largely misunderstood by the streaming community. Most importantly, we explain why content-aware encoding is not the solution by itself to the problems most providers are facing today.

Bio: Ali C. Begen has joined MediaMelon, Inc. as the principal architect for streaming technologies in February 2016, where he is currently heading the development efforts for MediaMelon’s content-aware streaming solutions that enable premium viewer experience while minimizing operational costs and improving profitability. He is also a co-founder of Networked Media, a technology company that offers consulting services to industrial, legal and academic institutions in the IP video space. He has been a research and development engineer since 2001, and has broad experience in mathematical modeling, performance analysis, optimization, standards development and intellectual property innovation. Between 2007 and 2015, he was with the Video and Content Platforms Research and Advanced Development Group at Cisco, where he has architected, designed and developed algorithms, protocols, products and solutions in the service provider and enterprise video domains. Since 2007, he has been leading professional and academic projects, and teaching graduate-level courses and giving lectures in universities around the world. Ali holds a Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech. He received a number of scholar and industry awards, and he has editorial positions in prestigious magazines and journals in the field. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM. More recently, in January 2016, he was elected as a distinguished lecturer by the IEEE Communications Society. Further information on his projects, publications, keynotes, tutorials, and teaching, standards and professional activities can be found at http://ali.begen.net.

Oge Marques | Distinguished ACM Speaker | Florida Atlantic University (FAU) | May 10, 2016 | 14:00 | Seeparkhotel (co-located with mmsys2016.itec.aau.at)

Abstract: There are many challenging problems in computer vision for which state-of-the-art solutions fall short of performing perfectly. The realization that many of these tasks are arduous for computers yet are relatively easy for humans has inspired many researchers to approach those problems from a human computation viewpoint, using methods that include crowdsourcing and games often called games with a purpose(GWAPs). The talk discusses how we can use human computation (in general) and particularly games to help uncover hidden aspects of visual perception and use these findings to improve computer vision solutions to related problems.

Bio: Oge Marques (http://faculty.eng.fau.edu/omarques/) is Professor of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) (Boca Raton, Florida). He has more than 25 years of teaching and research experience in the fields of image processing and computer vision. His research interests are in the area of intelligent processing of visual information, which combines the fields of image processing, computer vision, image retrieval, machine learning, serious games, and human visual perception. He is particularly interested in the combination of human computation and machine learning techniques to solve computer vision problems. He is the (co-) author of two patents, more than 100 refereed journal and conference papers, and several books in these topics, including the textbook Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB (Wiley-IEEE Press, 2011). He is Editor-in-Chief (with Borko Furht) of the upcoming 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of Multimedia (http://encyclopediaofmultimedia.com). He is a senior member of both the ACM and the IEEE and a member of the honor societies of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Muhammad Taimoor Khan, MSc. PhD. | 29.02.2016 | 11:00 Uhr | E.2.69

Abstract

In this talk, we present a rigorous behavior based approach to develop reliable, secure and resilient application software for industrial control systems (in particular). The goal here is to employ formal methods to first build application right and then to continuously monitor the application for security and resilience.
To achieve the goal, we first develop correct-and-secure-by-construction application software using theorem proving (i.e. prover Coq) through refinement and synthesis of abstract data types. Then we introduce a run-time security monitor for application software, which detects both known and unknown computational cyber attacks. For resilience, we employ dependency directed reasoning to recover the system in a safe state, if any inconsistency is detected. Our security monitor is sound and complete, eliminating false alarms, as well as efficient, supporting real-time systems. In contrast, conventional run-time security monitors for application software either produce (high rates of) false alarms (e.g. intrusion detection systems) or limit application performance (e.g. run-time verification systems).
Our run-time monitor detects attacks by checking the consistency between the application run-time behavior and its expected behavior modeled in its specification. Our specification language is based on monadic second order logic (i.e. first order logic and set theory) and event calculus interpreted over algebraic data structures; application implementation can be in any programming language. Based on our defined denotational semantics of the specification language, we prove that the security monitor is sound and complete, i.e. it produces an alarm if and only if it detects an inconsistency between the application execution and the specified behavior. Importantly, the monitor detects not only cyberattacks but all behavioral deviations from specification, e.g. bugs, and so, is readily applicable to the security of legacy systems.
Finally, we present the evaluation of the monitor in the industrial control systems security domain, specifically in water management, demonstrating that run-time, sound and complete monitors employing verification techniques are effective, efficient and readily applicable to demanding real-time critical systems, without scalability limitations.

Muhammad Taimoor Khan is a postdoctoral researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute (jointly with CSAIL, MIT, USA), Qatar. His current research is to develop reliable, secure and resilient software by the application of formal methods. On one hand, his project is focused on developing a tool to automatically detect and correct, known and unknown attacks through monitoring behavioral inconsistencies between specification and execution at run-time. On the other hand, his another project is focused on using theorem prover as a programming language to develop correct-and-secure-by construction software.
Prior to this, Taimoor Khan has passed doctoral studies at Research Institute for Symbolic Computation, Hagenberg, Austria with All-Distinctions in 2014. His PhD dissertation was about formal specification and verification of computer algebra software. Before joining RISC, he graduated in MSc Advanced Distributed Systems from the University of Leicester, UK with Distinction in 2008. As a final semester project he worked on the model-based verification of the various communication protocols of NASA in the frame of project “Space Link Extension Service Management”. Also prior to this, he completed his M.Sc. in Computer Science from Pakistan in 2001 and then worked for about five years in the software industry specializing in Java (EE/ME), XML and Web Services.
Taimoor Khan has been visiting scientist at various international reputed institutes including CSAIL, MIT, USA and ENSIIE, INRIA, France. Also he has won various research awards including the best student paper award at the most premier conference in computer algebra (CICM) in 2012.
He is also working as an associate tutor at University of Leicester, UK. Here he is teaching different courses (e.g. Domain Specific Languages) to MSc students (DL) and supervising their final semester projects. Prior to that, he has also taught undergraduate and graduate students at numerous universities in Pakistan as an assistant professor for several years.