Vortragender:
Assoc.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. György WERSÉNYI
Széchenyi István University, Györ, Hungary
Faculty of Engineering Sciences
Department of Telecommunications

Abstract:
Virtual Reality Simulators create a multisensory 3D space for subjects by using visual screens and auditory displays. In this multimedia presence, audio plays a significant role. Users often wear headphones and a virtual sound space is rendered with directional information.
In order to achieve this, psychoacoustic measurements, implementation of digital filters, subjective listening tests etc. are required. The whole process raises several problems, so information technology and engineering solutions may help reducing errors, inconvenience or even price.
Besides basic research questions about the human spatial hearing, measurement and playback systems support the development of assistive applications, devices mostly focused on people with disabilities, such as rehabilitation, sports or the community of the visually impaired.

Kurzbio:
György Wersényi was born in Györ, Hungary, in 1975. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1998 and the Ph.D. degree from the Brandenburgische Technische Universitat (BTU) Cottbus, Germany, in 2002. He has been a member of the Department of Telecommunications at the Szechenyi Istvan University, Hungary, since 2002.
He is an associate professor at the field of telecommunications, audio and video broadcast, and electroacoustics. His current research includes spatial hearing, listening tests, virtual audio displays, acoustic measurement, and dummy-head techniques.
Dr. Wersenyi is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, the Hungarian Telecommunication Society, and board member of the International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD).

Abstract: Safety and comfort of passenger cars are improving steadily. This leads to a reduced number of fatal traffic accidents while the number of driven kilometers per year increases. Several factors are responsible for this development. Among them the application of automatic control plays an important role. Modern automotive control systems can support the driver in critical situations, e.g. by appropriate brake interventions and/or improve the handling and efficiency of cars, e.g. by active steering or intelligent throttle control. In this talk the principles of selected automotive control systems will be discussed. It will be outlined how model-based design techniques can be employed to develop powerful assistance systems for modern passenger cars.

CV: Martin Horn is professor for Control and Mechatronic Systems and head of the Institute for Smart System Technologies at the University Klagenfurt since 2008. His research interests cover nonlinear robust control, modelling, simulation and control of mechatronic systems with automotive applications. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Graz University of Technology . In 2003 he finished his habilitation at the same university and was awarded the venia legendi in “control systems and system dynamics” .

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. It particularly highlights two examples of our recent work on the topic:
1.   Guess That Face (with Mathias Lux and Justyn Snyder, CHI 2013): a face recognition game that reverse engineers the human biological threshold for accurately recognizing blurred faces of celebrities under time-varying conditions.
2.   Ask’N’Seek (with Vincent Charvillat and Axel Carlier, ECCV 2012): an object detection and labeling game that asks users to guess the location of a hidden region within an image with the help of semantic and topological clues and uses the information collected from game logs, combined with results from content analysis algorithms, to feed a machine learning algorithm that outputs the outline of the most relevant regions within the image and their names.

Short CV:
Oge Marques is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) (Boca Raton, Florida). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from FAU in 2001. He has more than 20 years of teaching and research experience in the fields of image processing and computer vision, in different countries (U.S., Austria, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, France, and India), languages (English,Portuguese,Spanish), and capacities.He is the (co-) author of more than 50 refereed journal and conference papers and several books in these topics, including the textbook Practical Image and Video Processing UsingMATLAB (Wiley, 2011). 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 a senior member of both the ACM and IEEE, and a member of the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Education Society, IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the honor societies of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Abstract: Many daily activities we want to finish as fast and smoothly as possible. The same applies when we use our computing devices. Examples range from low-level actions, such as selecting the “Print” item from the “File” menu or clicking on desktop icons, to higher level activities and more complex tasks, such as finding the favorite holiday photo in the personal collection, or to use a smartphone to navigate a city map or to browse a long list of products before deciding on a purchase. Throughout the years, the desire for interaction efficiency has motivated the Human-Computer Interaction research community to seek and explore new interaction mechanisms and user interface techniques that improve on the state of the art. In this talk I will present a handful of past projects in which we have applied the experimental method to arrive at insights regarding novel user interface design solutions.

CV: David Ahlström received his M.Sc. degree from Stockholm University and his Ph.D. from the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt where he works in the Interactive Systems Group at the Department of Informatics Systems. His research is focused on the design and evaluation of interactive human-computer user interfaces with the aim to improve every day activities of computer use.

Abstract: People spend about 70% of the time in their homes sleeping, eating, doing housework, entertaining,  etc.  Therefore, it is not surprising that people try to make their homes as fullfilling as possible. Technological progress has provided a huge variety of possible enhancements to the quality of life, through so-called „smart“ devices and “smart” functionality. Although smart appliances for the home have been available on the market for decades, they haven’t reached a critical mass in the private home sector. In this talk the potential reasons for this are discussed and examples of state-of-the-art smart functions are provided and evaluated from different scientific perspectives, with a specific focus on the overlap area between computer sciences and psychology – human computer interaction. On the basis of the human-centric design approach, we propose a new concept: “the Wise Home”. The wise home differentiates itself from the smart home by being more supportive to the requirements and needs of humans, rather than over the assumption of responsibility based on a misunderstanding of what it means to be “smart”.

CV: Gerhard Leitner is assistant professor in the Interactive Systems Research Group (Prof. Martin Hitz) at the University of Klagenfurt. He holds a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychology from Vienna University, and a PHD in the interdisciplinary field of Human Computer Interaction from the University of Klagenfurt. Mr. Leitner worked as a usability consultant at the CURE Institute (Center for Usability Research and Engineering) and within the Kabel New Media network of excellence for companies such as ZDF, OEBB, and Raiffeisen. His current research interests are Usability and User Experience in regard to ambient intelligence with a specific focus on smart living environments.

Vortragstermine und Themen

6. März 2013, 17.00 Uhr, HS 2 — Ass.-Prof. DDipl.-Ing. Dr. Stefan Rass — Security Infrastructures for Data- and Identity-Protection

• Security Infrastructure Design
• Security Risk Management
• Redactable Signatures
• Anonymous Communication

17. April 2013, 17.00 Uhr, HS 3 — Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. David Ahlström — From Menu Selection to Off-Screen Interaction with Eight-Hundred Seventy-two Study Participants

• Understanding Human-Factors in Computer use
• Novel User Interfaces and Interaction Mechanism
• Human-Computer Interaction Performance Studies

24. April 2013, 17.00 Uhr, Z 1.09 — Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Martin Pinzger — The Knowledgeable Software Engineer

• Software Evolution
• Software Metrics
• Fine-Grained Source Code Changes
• Change- and Bug Prediction
• Recommender Systems for Software Engineering

15. Mai 2013, 17.00 Uhr, HS 2 — Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Gerhard Leitner — The (Smart) Home of the Future – from the Perspective of Human Computer Interaction

• Current State of Smart Home Technology and Research
• Ambient Assisted Living
• Energy saving
• Remote Control
• Automation vs. Alternative Interfaces
• The goal: Wise instead of Smart

5. Juni 2013, 17.00 Uhr, HS 2 — Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Martin Horn — Modern Automotive Control Systems

• Active Suspension
• Throttle control
• Driver assistance systems
• Automotive control

19. Juni 2013, 17.00 Uhr HS 2 — Ass.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Angelika Wiegele — Efficient Algorithms for Hard Problems: Semidefinite Optimization for Binary Quadratic Programming

• Semidefinite Programming
• NP-hard Problems
• Combinatorial Optimization
• Branch-and-Bound

26. Juni 2013, 17.00 Uhr, HS 2 — Ass.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Klaus Schöffmann — Visual Content Browsing – Combining Exploratory Search and Automatic Multimedia Content Analysis

• Content-Based Search
• Interaction with Images and Videos
• Visual Content Analysis
• Evaluation of Visual Content Browsing

Abstract:

Multi-objective ant colony optimization (MOACO) algorithms have shown promising results for various multi-objective problems, but they also offer a large number of possible design choices. Often, exploring all possible configurations is practically infeasible. Recently, the automatic configuration of a MOACO framework was explored and was shown to result in new state-of-the-art MOACO algorithms for the bi-objective traveling salesman problem. In this paper, we apply this approach to the bi-objective bidimensional knapsack problem (bBKP) to prove its generality and power. As a first step, we tune and improve the performance of four MOACO algorithms that have been earlier proposed for the bBKP. In a second step, we configure the full MOACO framework and show that the automatically configured MOACO framework outperforms all previous MOACO algorithms for the bBKP as well as their improved variants.

(link: IridiaTr2012-013)

Université Libre de Bruxelles