ACIS Award - Requirements Bazaar won RE'13 Best Tool Demo Award

Image courtesy of Dominik Renzel

At the 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from 15th to 19th July, 2013, Dominik Renzel from the ACIS group at RWTH Aachen University presented a poster and demonstration of Requirements Bazaar, a Web-based tool for Social Requirements Engineering. In contrast to previous years, best poster and tool demo awards were judged by the conference audience. Each conference participant could vote by attaching sticky notes in different colors standing for different amounts of points. Our demo received by far the most sticky notes with "good colors" in comparison to the 7 other demos. In the end, we won the prestigious RE'13 Best Tool Demo award. Thanks to all colleagues contributing to this very nice result! In particular, we thank our student Malte Behrendt, who realized the Requirements Bazaar in his master thesis. 

More information on Requirements Bazaar including videos, papers, etc. is available at http://requirements-bazaar.org/info.

Read More

ACIS Presentation - Community Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects: Aging and Social Reshaping

Anna Hannemann from the ACIS group at RWTH Aachen University gave a presentation on "Community Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects: Aging and Social Reshaping" at the Open Source Systems Conference in Slovenia. This presentation is part of our research on community analytics which makes heavy use of social network analysis.

Community Dynamics in Open Source Software Projects: Aging and Social Reshaping from Anna Glukhova

Read More

Special Issue on Scientific Cloud Computing - IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing

Special Issue on Scientific Cloud Computing

http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/events/ScienceCloud2014-TCC/

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submissions Due: July 31, 2014
First Round Decision: September 30,2014
Major Revisions Due (if neccesary): October 31, 2014 Final Decision:
December 1, 2014 Journal Publication: TBD

OVERVIEW

Computational and Data-Driven Sciences have become the third and fourth
pillar of scientific discovery in addition to experimental and theoretical
sciences.
Scientific Computing has already begun to change how science is done,
enabling scientific breakthroughs through new kinds of experiments that
would have been impossible only a decade ago. It is the key to solving
"grand challenges" in many domains and providing breakthroughs in new
knowledge, and it comes in many shapes and forms: high-performance computing
(HPC) which is heavily focused on compute-intensive applications;
high-throughput computing (HTC) which focuses on using many computing
resources over long periods of time to accomplish its computational tasks;
many-task computing (MTC) which aims to bridge the gap between HPC and HTC
by focusing on using many resources over short periods of time; and
data-intensive computing which is heavily focused on data distribution,
data-parallel execution, and harnessing data locality by scheduling of
computations close to the data. Today's "Big Data" trend is generating
datasets that are increasing exponentially in both complexity and volume,
making their analysis, archival, and sharing one of the grand challenges of
the 21st century. Not surprisingly, it becomes increasingly difficult to
design and operate large scale systems capable of addressing these grand
challenges.

This journal Special Issue on Scientific Cloud Computing in the IEEE
Transaction on Cloud Computing will provide the scientific community a
dedicated forum for discussing new research, development, and deployment
efforts in running these kinds of scientific computing workloads on Cloud
Computing infrastructures. This special issue will focus on the use of
cloud-based technologies to meet new compute-intensive and data-intensive
scientific challenges that are not well served by the current
supercomputers, grids and HPC clusters. The special issue will aim to
address questions such
as: What architectural changes to the current cloud frameworks (hardware,
operating systems, networking and/or programming models) are needed to
support science? Dynamic information derived from remote instruments and
coupled simulation, and sensor ensembles that stream data for real-time
analysis are important emerging techniques in scientific and cyber-physical
engineering systems. How can cloud technologies enable and adapt to these
new scientific approaches dealing with dynamism? How are scientists using
clouds? Are there scientific HPC/HTC/MTC workloads that are suitable
candidates to take advantage of emerging cloud computing resources with high
efficiency? Commercial public clouds provide easy access to cloud
infrastructure for scientists. What are the gaps in commercial cloud
offerings and how can they be adapted for running existing and novel
eScience applications? What benefits exist by adopting the cloud model, over
clusters, grids, or supercomputers? What factors are limiting clouds use or
would make them more usable/efficient?

TOPICS

The topics of interest are, but not limited to, the application of Cloud in
scientific applications:

· Scientific application cases studies on Clouds · Performance evaluation of
Cloud technologies · Fault tolerance and reliability in cloud systems ·
Data-intensive workloads and tools on Clouds · Programming models such as
Map-Reduce · Storage cloud architectures · I/O and Data management in the
Cloud · Workflow and resource management in the Cloud · NoSQL databases for
scientific applications · Data streaming and dynamic applications on Clouds
· Dynamic resource provisioning · Many-Task Computing in the Cloud ·
Application of cloud concepts in HPC environments · Virtualized High
performance parallel file systems · Virtualized high performance I/O
networks · Virtualization and its Impact on Applications · Distributed
Operating Systems · Many-core computing and accelerators in the Cloud ·
Cloud security


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit papers with unpublished, original work to the
IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, Special Issue on Scientific Cloud
Computing. If the paper is extended from a workshop or conference paper, it
must contain at least 50% new material with "brand" new ideas and results.
The papers should not be longer than 14 double column pages in the IEEE TCC
format.
Papers should be submitted directly to TCC at
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcc-cs, and "SI-ScienceCloud" should be
selected.


Kate Keahey, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA ·
Ioan Raicu, Illinois Institute of Technology & Argonne National Lab., USA ·
Kyle Chard, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA ·
Bogdan Nicolae, IBM Research, Ireland


CONTACT

Email: sciencecloud2014-tcc-editors@datasys.cs.iit.edu
Website: http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/events/ScienceCloud2014-TCC/

Read More

The Third International Video Browser Showdown Competition (VBS2014)

Call for Papers for
The Third International Video Browser Showdown Competition (VBS2014)

January 7, 2014, held in conjunction with the 20th International
MultiMedia Modeling Conference (MMM) in Dublin, Ireland

http://www.videobrowsershowdown.org/


The VBS2014 will be a half-day workshop that will take place one day
before MMM2014 at the conference venue of MMM2014 in Dublin, Ireland. Only
the last 45 minutes will be public to the audience and act as a live and
moderated "special demo session" of MMM2014 right before the Welcome
Reception. This new schedule will allow a much more detailed analysis of
the search performance of participating teams as well as different kinds
of search tasks. The evaluation of the results will be published in an own
paper after the workshop.

Test Procedure

In VBS2014 we will use four different search categories:
- Visual KIS in a single video: the moderator presents a short video clip,
randomly selected from a common video file, which has to be found within 3
minutes (the video file will be mentioned).
- Descriptive KIS in a single video: the moderator presents a textual
description about a specific segment, randomly selected from a common
video file, which has to be found within 3 minutes (the video file will be
mentioned).
- Visual KIS in a video archive: the moderator presents a short video
clip, randomly selected from a common collection of ten videos, which has
to be found within 6 minutes.
- Descriptive KIS in a video archive: the moderator presents a textual
description about a specific segment, randomly selected from a common
collection of ten videos, which has to be found within 6 minutes.

Each search category will consist of several Known Item Search (KIS) tasks
that should be solved as fast as possible by interactive search. A
participant may register for only one or even for all four search
categories.

Interactive Search

The videos to be used for the Video Browser Showdown will be provided
without any metadata. However, participants are allowed to perform content
analysis that supports interactive browsing in the video (e.g., through
novel content visualization, content clustering, or advanced seeker-bars
etc.). The search process must be interactive, i.e., no text-queries are
allowed.

Data Set and Search Tasks

The data set will consist of about 30 video files (average duration of 1
hour) and will be made available to accepted participants several weeks
before the competition. These video files will have the following
characteristics: .mp4 file format, MPEG-4 video codec (H.264/AVC), AAC-LC
audio codec, standard-definition resolution. The KIS search tasks will be
presented on-site. The goal of each KIS task is to find a preselected
segment of interest (typically with a duration of 20 seconds) within a
specified time limit by interactive search. The segment of interest
doesn't necessarily start and stop at shot boundaries.

VBS Server

The Video Browser Showdown uses an own server application to evaluate
found segments for correctness. Therefore, all participants will be
connected to the server via a dedicated WiFi network and need to submit
found segments to the server via a simple HTTP-like protocol. The server
is connected to a beamer and presents the current score of all teams in a
live manner.

Participation

Anyone with a video browsing tool that allows for interactive browsing,
exploration, or navigation in a single video file or in video archives may
participate. However, search shouldn't be based on automatic queries.
Examples of tools of interest are: a video shot browser (e.g.,
temporal-based or concept-based), a video player with extended
navigation/interaction means, a video content exploration tool, or tools
using advanced visualizations for improved navigation/interaction (video
surrogates), etc. Tools developed for interactive video search on mobile
devices are of special interest. Moreover, also tools with collaborative
interactive search (e.g., with two users) are allowed.

Submission

To apply for participation please submit a scientific demo paper (2-3
pages in Springer LNCS format) via the MMM2014 submission system at
https://www.conftool.com/mmm2014/ (VBS track) until September 16, 2013.
The submission should include a detailed description of the video browsing
tool and how it supports interactive search in video. Submissions will be
peer-reviewed to ensure maximum quality. Accepted submissions will be
published in the conference proceedings of MMM 2014.

Important Dates

Demo paper submission deadline: September 16, 2013
Notification of acceptance: September 30, 2013
Camera-ready paper due: October 16, 2013
Author registration deadline: October 16, 2013

Read More

ACIS Colloquium -. XMPP - The Potential Heartbeat of Global-Scale Pervasive Computing

Informatik-Kolloquium XMPP from IstvanKoren

Tomorrow, our colleagues from the TU Dresden will visit the ACIS group at RWTH Aachen University. Daniel Schuster will give a computer science colloquium talk at the computer science department of RWTH Aachen University. He will talk about "XMPP  - The Potential Heartbeat of Global-Scale Pervasive Computing". Details can be found here.
Since the TU Dresden group and the ACIS group are both working on similar topics, we expect a lively discussion and future collaboration.

Abstract: The original vision of Pervasive Computing as an experience "refreshing as a walk in the woods" has been quite over-stressed in the last years. Nowadays we already live in a world of personal device zoos (notebooks, pads, phones and even smart watches), immersive social interaction and more and more addressable things connected to this overall experience. But while each of the demoed use cases looks impressive by itself, there is yet no means of global-scale communication and coordination to connect these isolated islands comparable to HTTP in connection with HTML and other standards for the Web. We explain how the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol XMPP is about to fill this gap and what is still missing. After a crash course in relevant XMPP basics we show current research and standardization work in XMPP for pervasive computing, social computing and the Internet of Things. We furthermore present research work within the Mobilis project at TU Dresden which adds session mobility and service-oriented XMPP development to these building blocks.

Read More

19th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'2014)

Call for Papers

IUI 2014

19th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI'2014)

Haifa, Israel February 24-27, 2014

http://www.iuiconf.org/

SCOPE AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

IUI 2014 is the 19th annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces.
IUI is where the community of people interested in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) meets the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. We are very interested in contributions that bridge these two fields and also related fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, computer graphics, the arts, etc. IUI researchers are interested in improving the symbiosis between humans and computers, so that interface design and interactive experiences yield higher performance outcomes.
This may involve designing interfaces that incorporate intelligent automated capabilities, if the net impact is a human-computer interaction that improves performance or usability in critical ways. It may also involve designing an interface that effectively leverages human skills and capabilities, so that human performance with an application excels. In other cases, such as educational interface design, it may involve exercising judgment in when not to automate a function so that humans are encouraged to exert themselves as they acquire new skills or domain knowledge.

We call for original submissions that describe novel technologies and applications to intelligent user interfaces.
IUI topics of interest including, but not limited to:

* User input
- Processing of multi-modal input
- Natural language and speech processing
- Gestures, eye gaze, face recognition
* Generation of system output
- Intelligent visualization tools
- Intelligent generation of user-consumable content
* Ubiquitous computing
- Intelligent interfaces for ubiquitous computing
- Smart environments and tangible computing
* Help and Persuasive Technologies
- Intelligent assistants for complex tasks
- Support for collaboration in multiuser environments
- Intelligent information and knowledge management
- Persuasive technologies in IUI
* Personalization
- User-adaptivity in interactive systems
- Recommender systems
- Modeling and prediction of user behavior
* AI Techniques in IUI
- Planning and plan recognition
- Reasoning in interfaces
- Knowledge-based systems
* Social Computing
- Affective, social and aesthetic interfaces
- Social networks and collaboration
* IUI Design
- Knowledge-based approaches to user interface design and generation
- Proactive and agent-based paradigms for user interaction
- Example-and demonstration-based interfaces
* User studies
- User studies concerning intelligent interfaces
- Evaluations of implemented intelligent user interfaces
* Semantic Web
- Query interfaces and novel interfaces for Linked Data
- Consuming Linked Data
- Interfaces for creating and using large ontologies

SUBMISSION VENUES

* Full and Short Papers
We invite original paper submissions that describe novel user interfaces, applications, interactive and intelligent technologies, empirical studies, or design techniques. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
IUI 2014 especially encourages submissions on innovative and visionary new concepts or directions for interface design. We do not require evaluations with users, but we do expect papers to include an appropriate evaluation for their stated contribution. Full papers should make substantial, novel and relevant
contributions to the field. Short papers can either contain smaller contributions, novel ground-breaking ideas, or work in progress. Accepted full papers will be invited for oral presentation and short paper either as oral or poster presentation.

Astracts Due: October 4, 2013
Full and Short Papers Due: October 9, 2013

* Demonstrations
The demonstrations track complements the overall program of the conference.
Demonstrations show implementations of novel, interesting, and important intelligent user interface concepts or systems. We invite submissions relevant to intelligent user interfaces and which address, but are not limited to, the topics of the conference. All submissions are intended to convey a scientific result or work in progress and should not be advertisements for commercial software packages.

Submissions Due: December 12, 2013

* Industrial Track

The industrial track represents an opportunity for the companies in the field to present their late work (as presentations, posters or interactive demos) and receive valuable feedback from the research community. It also provides an opportunity for recruitment and for networking. The industry track will not be peer-reviewed but the relevance of proposals for the field will be judged by a jury. Please contact industry track chairs at indtrackchair2014@iuiconf.org

Submissions Due: TBA

* Student Consortium

The IUI 2014 Student Consortium provides an opportunity for Masters and Doctoral students to present and receive feedback about their research in an interdisciplinary workshop, under the guidance of a panel of mentors, selected from senior people in the field. We invite students who feel they would benefit from this kind of feedback on their research to apply for this unique opportunity to share their work with students in a similar situation as well as senior researchers in the field. The strongest candidates will be those who have
a clear topic and research approach, and have made some progress, but who are not so far along their research that they can no longer make changes.

Submissions Due: November 1, 2013

* Workshops

Workshops will be held on the first day of the conference. We invite submissions of full-day (6 hours) and half-day (3 hours) workshop proposals on any of the conference topics.

Workshop Proposals due: September 16, 2013

ORGANIZATION
* General Co-Chairs:
- Tsvi Kuflik, The University of Haifa
- Oliviero Stock, FBK-irst

* Program Co-Chairs:
- Joyce Chai, Michigan State University
- Antonio Kruger, Saarland University and DFKI GmbH

* Treasurer
- Melinda Gervasio, SRI International

* Industry Chair:
- Claudia Goldman, General Motors - Advanced Technical Center - Israel
- Doron Friedman, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
- Massimo Zancanaro, FBK-irst

* Student Consortium Co-Chairs:
- Shlomo Berkovsky, NICTA
- Helmut Prendinger, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo

* Workshop and Tutorial Co-Chairs:
- Ido Guy, IBM Research - Haifa
- Tracy Hammond, Texas A&M University

* Demo Co-Chairs:
- Doron Friedman, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya
- Massimo Zancanaro, FBK – Fondazione Bruno Kessler

* Local Arrangements Co-Chairs:
- Joel Lanir, The University of Haifa
- Eran Toch, Tel Aviv University

* Registration Chair
- Amit Tiroshi, The University of Haifa

* Social media Chair
- Angel Puerta, RedWhale Software

* Publicity Chair:
- Nava Tintarev, University of Aberdeen

Read More

Special Issue on Autonomic Provisioning of Big Data Applications on Clouds - IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing -

Special Issue on

Autonomic Provisioning of Big Data Applications on Clouds

IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing

Guest Editors: Rajiv Ranjan, Lizhe Wang, Albert Zomaya, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Guojun Wang, and Xian-He Sun

Editor-in-Chief: Rajkumar Buyya

*** Call for Papers ***

This special issue solicits papers that advance the fundamental understanding, technologies, and concepts related to autonomic provisioning of cloud resources for Big Data applications. The research advancement is in this area is important because such large, heterogeneous, and uncertain Big Data applications are becoming increasingly common, yet current cloud resource provisioning methods do not scale well and nor do they perform well under highly unpredictable conditions (data volume, data variety, data arrival rate, etc.). If these problems are resolved, then cloud-hosted Big Data applications will operate more efficiently, with reduced financial and environmental costs, reduced under-utilisation of resources, and better performance at times of unpredictable workload.

Cloud computing assembles large networks of virtualised ICT services such as hardware resources (such as CPU, storage, and network), software resources (such as databases, application servers, and web servers) and applications. In industry these services are referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Mainstream ICT powerhouses such as Amazon, HP, and IBM are heavily investing in the provision and support of public cloud infrastructure. Cloud computing is rapidly becoming a popular infrastructure of choice among all types of organisations. Despite some initial security concerns and technical issues, an increasing number of organisations have moved their applications and services in to "The Cloud".These applications range from generic word processing software to online healthcare. The Cloud system taps into the processing power of virtualized computers on the back end, thus significantly speeding up the application for the user, which just pays for the used services.

Big Data applications has become a common phenomenon in domain of science, engineering, and commerce Some of the representative applications include disaster management, high energy physics, genomics, connectomics, automobile simulations, medical imaging, and the like. The "BigData" problem, which is defined as the practice of collecting complex data sets so large that it becomes difficult to analyse and interpret manually or using on-hand data management applications (e.g., Microsoft Excel). For example, in case of disaster management Big Data application there is a need to analyse "a deluge of online data from multiple sources (feeds from social media and mobile devices)" for understanding and managing real-life events such as flooding, earthquake, etc. Over 20 million tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy (2012) lead to an instance of the BigData problem. The statistics provided by the PearAnalytics study reveal that almost 44% of the Twitter posts are spam and pointless, about 6% are personal or product advertising, while 3.6% are news and 37.6% are conversational posts. During the 2010 Haiti earthquake, text messaging via mobile phones and Twitter made headlines as being crucial for disaster response, but only some 100,000 messages were actually processed by government agencies due to lack of automated and scalable ICT (cloud) infrastructure.

Although significant effort has been devoted to migrating generic web-based application to the Cloud, scant research and development has been done to create a unified software framework for provisioning Big Data applications on clouds. Provisioning means the selection, deployment, monitoring, and run-time management of PaaS and IaaS resources for ensuring that applications meet their Quality of Service (QoS) targets (for data analysis delay, data availability, alert generation delay, etc.) as agreed in the negotiated Service Level Agreement (SLA). IaaS clouds such as Amazon EC2 and GoGrid are too low-level, making development of Big Data applications difficult and resource provisioning unintelligent and inefficient. PaaS clouds such as Microsoft Azure are at an appropriate level, but it does not provide the right kind of abstraction required for supporting real-time analysis of massive dataset from multiple sources. Big Data applications are uncertain, as it has to deal with data which can be from multiple contexts and originated from heterogeneous sources. Furthermore, it is a difficult problem to estimate the behavior of Big Data applications in terms of data volume, data arrival rate, data types, and data processing time distributions. Secondly, from a cloud resource perspective, without knowing the requirements or behaviours of BigData applications, it is difficult to make decisions about the size of resources to be provisioned at any given time. Furthermore, the availability, load, and throughput of cloud resources can vary in unpredictable ways, due to failure, malicious attacks, or congestion of network links.

The special issue will also encourage submission of revised and extended versions of 2-3 best papers (based on votes of a panel) in the area of Cloud Computing from IEEE HPCC 2013 (http://trust.csu.edu.cn/conference/hpcc2013/Call%20for%20Papers.htm), IEEE CCGRID 2014 (http://datasys.cs.iit.edu/events/CCGrid2014/), and IEEE IC2E 2014 conferences.

Topics

Areas of interest for this special issue include the following:

- Algorithms for petabyte efficient non-SQL query-based Big Data processing and related Cloud resource optimisation.
- Big Data Application behavior prediction models
- Real-time analytics on streaming Big Data
- Collaborative sharing and management
- Big Data application performance evaluation study on public and private clouds
- Dynamic learning technique for new Big application behavior adaptation
- Queuing theory based cloud resource performance model solvers
- Stochastic fault-tolerance and reliability models
- Decentralized networking models for scalable Big Data application health monitoring
- Energy-efficiency models for provisioning of Big Data application provisioning
- Innovative Big Data Application use cases (disaster management, high energy physics, genomics, connectomics, automobile simulations, medical imaging, and the like)
- Security, privacy and trust-based Big Data application provisioning

Schedule
Submission due date: March 1, 2014
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2014
Submission of final manuscript: August 15, 2014
Publication date: 2nd Quarter, 2014(Tentative)

Submission & Major Guidelines

The special issue invites original research papers that make significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in "Autonomic Provisioning of Big Data Applications on Clouds". The papers must not have been previously published or submitted for journal or conference publications. However, the papers that have been previously published with reputed conferences could be considered for publication in the special issue if they are substantially revised from their earlier versions with at least 30% new contents or results that comply with the copyright regulations, if any. Every submitted paper will receive at least three reviews. The editorial review committee will include well known experts in the area of Grid, Cloud, and Autonomic computing.

Selection and Evaluation Criteria:
- Significance to the readership of the journal
- Relevance to the special issue
- Originality of idea, technical contribution, and significance of the presented results
- Quality, clarity, and readability of the written text
- Quality of references and related work
- Quality of research hypothesis, assertions, and conclusion

Guest Editors

Dr. Rajiv Ranjan – Corresponding Guest Editor
Research Scientist, CSIRO ICT Center
Computer Science and Information Technology Building (108)
North Road, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
Email: raj.ranjan@csiro.au

Prof. Lizhe Wang
Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences
No.9 Dengzhuang South Road, Hadian District
Beijing 100094, P.R. China
Email:lzwang@ceode.ac.cn

Prof. Albert Zomaya
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Chair Professor of High Performance Computing & Networking
School of Information Technologies, Building J12
The University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
Email: albert.zomaya@sydney.edu.au

Prof. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Research Director, Information Engineering, Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Center
Computer Science and Information Technology Building (108)
North Road, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
Email: dimitrios.georgakopoulos@csiro.au

Dr. Guojun Wang
Chairman and Professor of Department of Computer Science,
Central South University, Changsha, Hunan Province,
P. R. China, 410083
Tel/Fax: +86 731 88877711, Mobile: +86 13508486821
Email: csgjwang@mail.csu.edu.cn; csgjwang@gmail.com

Prof. Xian-He Sun
Director, The SCS Laboratory, Department of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
Email: sun@iit.edu

Read More

Special Issue on Smart Media-Optimized Applications in the Cloud - Springer Computing Journal

Computing Journal

Publisher: Springer 

Guest Editors: Rajiv Ranjan, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Lizhe Wang

*** Call for Papers ***

CISCO (a network technology giant) predicts that by 2016, 90% of internet traffic will be multimedia content (3D images, high resolution video, and audio). In addition to entertainment and advertising applications, the new multimedia content-driven applications in the domain of healthcare, aged-care, surveillance, and education will contribute significantly to this traffic. The new applications? contribution to the traffic will be due to their unprecedented processing (storage, distribution, and indexing) requirements for hundreds of petabytes of content. In the healthcare domain, live as well as archived videos will be used as a medium to educate patients about the aftercare treatment (follow-ups), once the patient is at home. This will include video instructions about how to change the dressing on a healing wound or how to brush their teeth after having braces installed. Other scenario from healthcare domain will arise from the problem of managing petabytes of multimedia content produced by advanced medical imaging devices. In the aged-care domain, health professional will rely on real-time or recorded video feeds from patient?s home to monitor clinical signs and indicators such as skin color, mood, affect, and to determine whether a patient is utilizing devices and medications appropriately. In the surveillance domain, governments, small businesses, and individuals will need to deal with stream of video content from security cameras and perform analytics (event detection, event tracking, and alert generation) on-the-fly for protecting citizens, homes and nations? critical infrastructures. Finally, in the education domain, students will need to have the opportunity to access teachers from home; especially, the students in rural or remote areas need an opportunity to be able to receive interactive lessons or instructions via live video streaming, from specialised teachers or trainers who are not available locally.

In the aforementioned application scenarios: (i) hundreds of petabytes of multimedia content will be generated in real-time as well as offline which will be required to be efficiently processed (stored, distributed, and indexed with a schema and semantics) in a way that does not compromise end-users? Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of content availability, content search delay, content analysis delay, and the like and (ii) the information retrieved from content will be consumed and processed in many places concurrently and collaboratively. Many of the existing ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructures that store, distribute, and index hundreds of petabytes of multimedia content fall short of this challenge or do not exist. Hence, we need more powerful and fast ICT infrastructures that can support scalable storage, indexing, and distribution of petabytes of multimedia content produced by aforementioned applications.

We believe that Cloud computing infrastructures (e.g., Amazon, Microsoft Azure, etc.) in conjunction with fast communication infrastructure will emerge as the platform for hosting and delivering aforementioned multimedia-content driven applications. Cloud computing assembles large networks of virtualised ICT services such as hardware resources (such as CPU, storage, and network), software resources (such as databases, application servers, and web servers) and applications. Cloud computing services are hosted in large data centres, often referred to as data farms, operated by companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsof Azure. In industry these services are referred to as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Cloud computing gives multimedia application developers the ability to marshal virtually infinite resources with an option to pay-per-use and as needed, instead of requiring upfront investments in resources that may never be optimally used. Once multimedia applications are hosted on cloud infrastructures, users are able to access them from anywhere at any time, using devices ranging from smartphones to desktop computers. While Cloud computing optimises the use of resources, it does not (yet) provide an effective solution hosting multimedia content-driven applications which has to process tsunami (often in real-time) of content from heterogeneous sources such as surveillance camera, medical imaging devices, etc.

Developing a software tools and technologies that can support end-to-end lifecycle operations of different multimedia content-driven applications on Cloud infrastructures (while ensuring the QoS targets) remains a challenging research problem. This challenge mainly arises from the uncertainty posed by application workloads (streaming vs. static content), resources capacity demands (e.g., bandwidth, memory, storage, and processors), failures (e.g., failure of a network link), access patterns (e.g., number of end-users and location), different device types (e.g., mobile phone, laptop, and smart TV), indexing needs (e.g., text and content based), and different network types (e.g. wired and wireless).

TopicsNovel software tools, techniques, and technologies for delivering smart media-optimized applications in the CLOUD, but not limited to:


- Cloud-based petabyte multimedia content storage tools and indexing algorithms
- Techniques for petabyte efficient non-SQL indexing of multimedia content
- Statistical multimedia application workload estimation and related cloud service optimization
- Network QoS aware provisioning of multimedia applications
- Techniques for provisioning multimedia applications in collaborative environments
- Autonomic techniques for provisioning cloud services to multimedia applications
- Techniques for content personalization and adaptation
- Innovative application case study from healthcare, aged care, surveillance, and education domains

Important Dates

November 1, 2013 Paper submission deadline
February 1, 2014 First notification
March 1, 2014 Revision submission
April 1, 2014 Second notification
May 1, 2014 Final version submission


Paper Submisison
The editors of the special issue are Rajiv Ranjan, Dimitrios Georgeakopoulos, and Lizhe Wang
Please submit a paper to Springer Editorial System for special issue by November 1, 2013
*Please select Special Issue Paper as your manuscript type, and enter ?Media Cloud? as both the Special Issue title and as your Preferred Editor*
Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference.
Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 30% new material to be considered for the special issue.
There is a 20 page length limit (12 point single space inclusive of figures and tables).
Springer has Latex templates but no special templates for Word; most papers are submitted in Word. Either Latex OR Word accepted.

Selection and Evaluation Criteria

- Significance to the readership of the journal
- Relevance to the special issue
- Originality of idea, technical contribution, and significance of the presented results
- Quality, clarity, and readability of the written text
- Quality of references and related work
- Quality of research hypothesis, assertions, and conclusion

Guest Editors

Dr. Rajiv Ranjan ? Corresponding Guest Editor
Research Scientist and Project Leader, Information Engineering Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601
Email: raj.ranjan@csiro.au

Prof. Dimitrios Georgakopoulos
Research Director, Information Engineering Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre, GPO Box 664, Canberra, ACT 2601
Email: dimitrios.georgakopoulos@csiro.au

Prof. Lizhe Wang
Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences
No.9 Dengzhuang South Road, Hadian District
Beijing 100094, P.R. China
Email:lzwang@ceode.ac.cn

Read More

Special Issue on Participatory Sensing and Crowd Intelligence - ACM TIST

Call for papers

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST)

Special Issue on

Participatory Sensing and Crowd Intelligence (PS/CI)

Introduction
Participatory Sensing (PS) is an emerging computing paradigm that tasks
everyday mobile devices to form participatory sensor networks. It allows
the increasing number of mobile phone users to share local knowledge
acquired by their sensor-enhanced devices, e.g., to monitor pollution
level or noise level, traffic condition, etc. Here, we make an extension
to the original definition of sensing sources in participatory sensing,
from mobile devices to any human life-loggers, such as sensor-equipped
vehicles, smart cards, social network services (the so-called virtual
sensors), and so on. The sensing data from volunteer contributors can be
further analyzed and processed to form Crowd Intelligence (CI), and
leveraged in many areas such as environment monitoring, urban planning,
emergency management, as well as public healthcare/safety. Numerous
challenges are raised: How can people and devices be connected so that
they act more intelligently than any individuals or devices have ev!
er done before? How to accomplish the tasks unintentionally or with
minimum user effort? How to extract crowd intelligence/knowledge from
multimodal, low quality data contributed by volunteers? What are the
incentive mechanisms to encourage human participation? How to protect
human data privacy¡­
This theme issue of ACM TIST (indexed by SCI-E and EI) provides the
opportunity for researchers and product developers to review and discuss
the state-of-the-art and trends of PS/CI techniques and intelligent
systems.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- AI techniques in PS/CI
- Crowd Data Collection and Intelligent Task Allocation
- Incentive Mechanisms for Human Participation
- Data Processing and Crowd Intelligence Mining
- Data Quality, Trust, and Privacy
- Knowledge Modeling and Management in PS/CI
- Intelligent applications supported by PS/CI (Smart City, Public Health, etc.)
- Crowd Intelligence Systems
- Intelligent User Interfaces for PS/CI
- Evaluation Metrics and Empirical Studies of PS/CI

It should be noted that we welcome papers that are relevant to the above
topics, but discourage papers that make contributions to only
networking/sensor issues but do not contribute to topics of interest to
TIST (e.g., topics on AI, intelligent systems).

Submissions
Manuscripts should be submitted online:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tist (please select "Special Issue:
Participatory Sensing and Crowd Intelligence" as the manuscript type).
Details of the journal and manuscript preparation are available on the
website: http://tist.acm.org/authors/.


Guest Editors
Bin Guo (Corresponding Guest Editor)
Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
guobin.keio@gmail.com

Alvin Chin
Nokia
alvin.chin@nokia.com

Zhiwen Yu
Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cn

Runhe Huang
Hosei University, Japan
rhuang@hosei.ac.jp

Daqing Zhang
Institut TELECOM SudParis, France
daqing.zhang@it-sudparis.eu

Important Dates
Deadline for manuscript submission: Dec. 31, 2013.
Notification of first review: Feb. 28, 2014
Submission of revised manuscript: Apr. 15, 2014
Notification of final acceptance: May. 31, 2014
Final manuscript due: Jun. 30, 2014
Publication date: 3rd Quarter, 2014 (Tentative)

Contact Information
Corresponding Guest Editor, Dr. Guo (guobin.keio@gmail.com)

Read More

ACIS Presentation - DireWolf - Distributing and Migrating User Interfaces for Widget-based Web Applications

Dejan Kovachev from the ACIS group at RWTH Aachen University gave a presentation on "DireWolf - Distributing and Migrating User Interfaces for Widget-based Web Applications" at the ICWE 2013 in Aalborg, Denmark. More information and the demo instructions can be found at our DireWolf web page.

DireWolf - Distributing and Migrating User Interfaces for Widget-based Web Applications from Dejan Kovachev

Read More

Open PhD Positions in DERI,NUI Galway/INSIGHT National Centre for Data Analytics

 We have a number of PhD positions funded by the new INSIGHT National Centre for Data Analytics <http://www.insight-centre.org/>. The positions will be based at DERI <http://deri.ie/> at NUI Galway and will address the following area.

Real time analytics of social, semantic and linked data

The widespread use of the social web and mobile devices and the availability of large collaboratively-maintained, multi-domain knowledge sources such as Wikipedia and DBpedia have created the potential to consolidate and link data from several sources into enormous heterogeneous networked data sets consisting of nodes and edges with inherent semantic meaning, interdependence and provenance.

While graph analytics and processing frameworks generally consider generic edges and nodes, we plan to address the challenges in the analysis of large heterogeneous information networks – influence measurement, information propagation, similarity calculation and clustering, structural role analysis, the detection of dependent concepts and latent relationships, real time analytics, the use and extraction of network schemas, and approaches for user-guided querying due to the additional complexity of the network space.

In parallel, we will address techniques to consolidate various sources of social semantic data, and to improve the quality of user-generated content through techniques such as gamification and the identification of authoritative users in crowdsourcing efforts.

The research will be applied in the following domains (amongst others)

* Novel scientometrics based on analysis of social media and Web data
* Real time social media analytics for large customer support centres
* Real time recommendation of knowledge/related topics for media outlets with large archives
* Social media analytics to identify influential users and their behaviours in the domain of digital media broadcasting

Some of the core challenges will be :

* Novel approaches to Social Network Analysis and Graph Mining on heterogeneous networks to uncover dependent concepts, labels, latent relationships and for causality exploration
* Scalable and interpretable user/group role analysis and modelling
* Graph-based real-time recommendation approaches using Linked Data as a source of open background data
* Spatio-temporal correlation analysis on linking patterns to uncover root causes of changes to network structure
* Predictive models of social network evolution and significant events such as churn, community formation
* Stream-computing models for mining massive heterogeneous graphs - for example graphs combining social and linked-data
* Hybrid graph mining techniques combining statistical and logic, inductive and deductive approaches
* Crawling, consolidation and indexing of social semantic data so that it can be exploited for large-scale real-time analytics
* Evaluation and verification of crowd-sourced user-generated content

*How to apply:*

Applicants should have an excellent primary degree in computer science, maths or a relevant discipline (e.g. computationally focused social science). A master's degree would be a benefit. Applicants are asked to familiarise themselves with our previous research and to write a letter of introduction explaining their interest in the research we conduct and why they believe they are suitable for the position.

Each application should only contain a CV and the letter of introduction - please do not include references, testimonials, certificates, university grades etc. We may request these later.

Applications should be sent to conor.hayes@nuigalway.ie with the subject line INSIGHTSW3. The deadline for this application is July 31st, but potential applicants are encouraged to submit early.

For more information, please visit <http://uimr.deri.ie/vacancies/>

Read More

ACIS Preprint - Requirements Bazaar: Social Requirements Engineering for Community-Driven Innovation

A preprint of our RE 2013 contribution "Requirements Bazaar: Social Requirements Engineering for Community-Driven Innovation" is available. Dominik Renzel will present the Requirements Bazaar demo next week in Rio. You can do that also right now. If you prefer to watch videos, there is also a video download available. Here is another ACIS screencast of the Requirements Bazaar.

Read More

PhD position @ TU Delft, The Netherlands - Declarative & Semantic Modelling for PTSD

PhD position at

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Duration of contract: 4 years
Salary scale: €2062 to €2638 per month gross

Apply before: August 1st, 2013 (details at http://goo.gl/q8UuE)


JOB DESCRIPTION

The candidate will participate in the "Virtual eCoaching and Storytelling
technology for post-traumatic stress disorder treatment (VESP)" project,
which studies how effective a stand-alone, multi-modal memory
restructuring
(3MR) system and an Internet-based, guided self-therapy system could be
used for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients.
The main goal of this PhD project is to investigate how a storytelling
framework could use declarative and semantic methods for enabling patients
to easily re-create an experience via a virtual environment for
therapeutic
purposes. Among other tasks, the PhD student will investigate (1) desired
object semantics and associations for virtual reality exposure therapy
(VRET) environments, (2) how to integrate procedural techniques and
non-intrusive interactive methods, and (3) methods to support the
declarative creation of scenarios and their consistency maintenance.
The project will combine new techniques with existing, in-house algorithms
and systems, e.g. procedural methods, solvers, and libraries. Within the
VESP team, the candidate will work closely together with two other PhD
students, who will respectively (1) investigate how to establish a virtual
coach that assists in the treatment execution, and (2) design and conduct
two Randomized Controlled Trials to evaluate the efficacy of PTSD
treatment
systems.   


REQUIREMENTS

You have a university MSc degree in computer science, human-computer
interaction or a related area, with excellent grades. Experience with
computer graphics and game technology is a plus. You have excellent
programming skills in languages such as C#, C++ and Python, and have a
passion for game technology and (serious) gaming. You have excellent
communication skills, and a good mastery of both spoken and written
English. You have a creative mind and are an excellent player in a
multi-disciplinary team that spans areas such as human-computer
interaction, computer graphics, serious gaming, and clinical psychology.

The project will be mainly performed within the Computer Graphics and
Visualization Group, which has more than 25 years of experience in
research
in a wide range of topics in computer graphics, visualization, game
technology, augmented/virtual reality, and geometric modeling.

For more details, see http://goo.gl/q8UuE

For information on this position, contact: R.Bidarra@tudelft.nl

Read More

ACIS Poster - DireWolf - Distributing and Migrating User Interfaces for Widget-based Web Applications Poster

DireWolf - Distributing and Migrating User Interfaces for Widget-based Web Applications Poster from Nicolaescu Petru

Read More

1 Postdoc and 2 PhD positions in Game Studies, The Netherlands

Utrecht University (UU), Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) are looking for highly motivated Postdoc and PhD candidates who consider it a challenge to conduct their research in the context of a collaborative research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) on Persuasive gaming. From theory-based design to validation and back. The project is a collaboration between UU, TU/e, EUR and a number of Dutch game developers.

Project description

The research in this collaborative project is concerned with the characteristics, design principles, and effectiveness of persuasive gaming. We study gaming practices that combine the dissemination of information with attempts to engage players in particular behaviors and attitudes. The project has three subprojects: two PhD projects and one Postdoc project. The PhD projects focus on design principles (TU/e) and validation (EUR), the Postdoc project  focuses on the persuasive dimensions of serious games (UU).

Offer

Employments start October 1, 2013. The postdoc contract will be running for 3,0 years, the PhD contracts will be running for 4,0 years. Apply until: 19 August 2013. In the Netherlands, a PhD and a Postdoc are considered to be proper jobs. In other words, they are paid to conduct their research.

Additional information

Additional information about the positions can be obtained through the following link: www.persuasivegaming.nl.

Read More

ACIS Presentation -. Robust Expert Finding in Web-Based Community Information Systems

I gave this presentation "Robust Expert Finding in Web-Based Community Information Systems" on Tuesday, July 2, 2013 in Graz Austria at the Workshop on "The Future of Scientifically Founded Databases on Experts". It is partly based on work on robust identification of experts recently published in the PhD thesis of Khaled Rashed from the ACIS group.

Robust Expert Finding in Web-Based Community Information Systems from Ralf Klamma

Read More

ACIS Screencast - Requirements Bazaar: Social Requirements Engineering for Community-Driven Innovation

Dominik Renzel did this screencast for our demo at the 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

 

Read More

Post-Doctoral Research Position at IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona

POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITION AT IIIA-CSIC, BARCELONA

The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) will offer a 2.5-year post-doctoral research position to work on COINVENT, a high-profile international research project to be funded under the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme.

The IIIA-CSIC belongs to the Spanish National Research Council, Spain's largest public institution devoted to research and technological development. The IIIA-CSIC is a leading research centre in Europe in the areas of multiagent systems, machine learning, and uncertainty reasoning. It attracts funding from the European, Spanish, and Catalan governments and has substantial collaborative research projects with industry.

The COINVENT project, led by Dr. Marco Schorlemmer and Prof. Enric Plaza, aims at advancing in the formal understanding of creativity by developing a computationally feasible, cognitively-inspired formal model of concept invention, drawing from interdisciplinary research results from cognitive science, artificial intelligence, formal methods and computational creativity, and validating it for mathematical reasoning and melodic harmonisation. For more details pleas visit http://www.iiia.csic.es/coinvent/.

REQUIREMENTS:
- doctoral degree in computer science or related fields
- programming skills and the ability to demonstrate a knowledge of techniques in artificial intelligence, particularly in computational logic, formal methods, knowledge representation and reasoning
- excellent oral and written skills in English, including writing reports and academic publications
- the ability to work independently or as part of a team with academic and commercial partners to achieve goals within tight time constraints
- the ability to demonstrate enthusiasm about state-of-the-art research, development and technology transfer

SALARY:
39.229,96€ per annum, payed in 14 instalments (2.802,14€ per month).

START DATE:
1st January 2014 at earliest. It may be possible to start later than this depending on the candidates' circumstances.

APPLICATION:
Please fill out the web application form (http://www.iiia.csic.es/coinvent/application/form/) with
- your personal data,
- a short statement, in English, of why you are interested in joining the COINVENT project at IIIA-CSIC,
- name and contact information of one or two persons who are willing to provide confidential references, and
- your complete CV in PDF format.


CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATION: 15th September 2013.

For further information please contact Dr. Marco Schorlemmer (marco@iiia.csic.es).

Read More

Special Theme on School of the Future and Future Classrooms in the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology

Call For Articles - BULLETIN OF THE TECHNICAL COMMITTEE ON LEARNING
TECHNOLOGY (ISSN 2306-0212) http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin
publication of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning
Technology (TCLT)

* Special Theme: School of the Future and Future Classrooms
* Deadline for submission: July 24, 2013.


The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology (former
Learning Technology Newsletter) aims at publishing and disseminating current
research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their
design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of
technology enhanced learning.

The special theme of this issue will focus on topics related to the school
of the future and future classrooms, including (but not limited to) research
on concepts, design and practical applications of technologies to build
future classrooms and schools, case studies and exploratory studies on
future classrooms and schools, and evaluations of future classrooms and
schools.

Articles that are not in the area of the special theme are most welcome as
well and will be published in the regular article section. The Bulletin of
the Technical Committee on Learning Technology invites short articles, case
studies, and project reports for the April issue. This issue will be
published in Volume 15, Issue 3 (July, 2013).


** The bulletin is of non-refereed nature though the articles will be
selected and edited by the Editors. **


Submission procedure:

1. Authors have to follow the IEEE author guidelines when preparing their
articles (please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/authors-guidelines for
further information)

2. The articles in the bulletin are limited to 4 pages. Over-length articles
will not be published.

3. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format. Any figures used
in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif
or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate
places.

4. Please send the manuscripts by email to karagian@uth.gr and
sabineg@athabascau.ca (Subject: Bulletin of TCLT Submission).

5. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original
material that has not been published, and is not being considered for
publication elsewhere.

For further information please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/bulletin.

Best regards,
Sabine Graf
Charalampos Karagiannidis
(Editors of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology)

Read More