Project activities in the period of 2013 - 2019

(For a comprehensive list of projcts please see this listing.)

In the project PRECIOUS (TP2) (funded by EU FP7, partners within the CS Faculty were the groups COSY, EC, and MIS) the goal was to provide a preventive care system to promote healthy lifestyles, which is comprised of three components: (1) transparent sensors for monitoring user context and health indicators (food intake, sleep and activity) that deliver ambient data about current user behavior; (2) users are represented by individual virtual models, which infer health risks and suggest behavioral changes; (3) state-of-the-art motivational techniques originating from gamification and motivational interviews to trigger a set of feedback tools to change the user habits toward more healthy behavior. 

The project Object to Icon (O2I, funded by FWF), an interdisciplinary research project conducted at the Institute of Egyptology in cooperation with the research group Multimedia Information Systems at the University of Vienna, based its research on the former FWF project MeKeTRE. The project dealt with the assessment and study of objects of Middle Kingdom tombs – their three-dimensional “existence” compared to and contrasted with their two-dimensional rendering in art. The MIS group contributed the entire technical basis for the project, extending the MEKETREpository system (which MIS contributed to the previous MeKeTRE project) by utilizing crowd sourcing technologies that allow scholars in the Egyptological domain to access efficiently pre-processed data such as images and annotations.

The project FAMOUS (funded by WWTF) was looking into a radically different approach to the context-based retrieval of very large video collections. Large media repositories are often facing large additions of new material with no prior knowledge about the content. The screening, assessment, and filtering of potentially interesting sequences is currently a tedious process feasible manually only. Despite recent advances in computer vision approaches, in most cases, existing media retrieval systems allow only for a straightforward retrieval based on available, but limited metadata such as title and performer, or user recommendations. Interesting and fresh material easily gets lost in the flood of data. This project counteracts these trends by providing efficient access and indexing methods for large video repositories that additionally account for similarity in the context of film grammatical and semantic concepts. As a result, the project introduces a radically different approach to the context-based retrieval of very large video collections by addressing unusual and, thus, potentially interesting material only.

In the project FactCheck++ (an internally funded project) the group started developing techniques and a scalable system architecture for automatically detecting conflicting data/information on the Web. This requires, in particular, to look into the architecture for a scalable, Web-infrastructure-based detection service that should become available as part of the well-established Web-infrastructure. The work is based on the results of a PhD thesis which shows the feasibility of the concept in general. 

In the project CS-AWARE (funded by EU H2020) the aim is to provide city administrations of the European Union with tools and methodologies for creating improved information security awareness and advanced system monitoring capabilities. The core contribution of the research group in this project is on the technical side, providing the overall information flow model and coordinating the practical implementations together with University of Oulu, City of Rome and City of Larissa.

In the project ODYSSEUS (funded by FFG KIRAS) the focus is on supporting the protection of critical infrastructures. Especially cascading effects and dependencies between infrastructures are modelled. The resulting models are then used for simulating materialized threats and serve as input for strategy and capacity planning. The major input of the group to this research project consists of modelling cascading effects and underlying scenarios. Furthermore, threat intelligence and data source analysis are targeted. The contribution is made in close cooperation with the project coordinator, government representatives from the Ministries of Interior and Defense, and the City of Vienna.

The research group is a partner of the FFG funded Austrian Blockchain Center (a FFG COMET-Center coordinated by the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien)). The Center's mission is to be the one-stop-shop Austrian Research Center for Blockchain (and related) technologies to be applied in industrial applications like industry 4.0 / IoT as well as financial, energy, logistics, government and administrative applications. The group is contributing based on its expertise on next generation blockchain systems that support semantic and structured data management as a core service of a blockchain system. The context of this project provides a vast opportunity to collaborate with industrial as well as academic partners.

Selected Research Output for the period of 2013 - 2019

125 Publications total in 2013 - 2019. For a comprehensive list of publications please see this listing.

Selected Key Publications 2013 - 2019 (subgroup on multimedia topics)

Abu Naim, B., & Klas, W. (2014). Smart authoring and sharing of multimedia content in personal area networks based on subject of interest. In 2014 IEEE International conference on multimedia and expo workshops (ICME). DOI: doi.org/10.1109/ICMEW.2014.6890603 , eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/4193/

Kalchgruber, P., Klas, W., Jnoub, N., & Roochi, E. M. (2018). Factcheck - identify and fix conflicting data on the web. In 18th International Conference on Web Engineering. DOI: doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91662-0_25 , eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/5798/

Rawassizadeh, R., Momeni, E., Dobbins, C., Gharibshah, J., & Pazzani, M. (2016). Scalable Daily Human Behavioral Pattern Mining from Multivariate Temporal Data. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE). vol. 28, no. 11, 1 Nov. 2016. DOI: doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2016.2592527 , eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/4865/

Momeni, E., Cardie, C., & Diakopoulos, N. (2015). A Survey on Assessment and Ranking Methodologies for User-Generated Content on the Web. ACM Computing Surveys 48, 3, Article 41 (December 2015), 49 pages. DOI: doi.org/10.1145/2811282 , eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/4623/

Zaharieva, M., Fabro, M. D., & Zeppelzauer, M. (2015). Cross-platform social event detection. IEEE Multimedia. doi.org/10.1109/MMUL.2015.31

Selected Key Publications 2013 - 2019 (subgroup on information security management topics)

Amiri, F., Quirchmayr, G., & Kieseberg, P. (2018). A machine learning approach for privacy-preservation in e-business applications. In 15th international conference on security and cryptography (SECRYPT 2018). doi.org/10.5220/0006826306090618

Backfried, G., Schmidt, C., Aniola, D., Meurers, C., Mak, K., Göllner, J., Peer, A., Quirchmayr, G., Czech, G., & Glanzer, M. (2016). A general framework for using social and traditional media during natural disasters: Quoima and the Central European floods of 2013. In Fusion methodologies in crisis management. Springer International Publishing. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22527-2_22

Backfried, G., Schmidt, C., Pfeiffer, M., Quirchmayr, G., & Göllner, J. (2015). Open source intelligence for traditional and social media sources, In 10th International Conference on E-Business (INCEB2015). eprints. cs.univie.ac.at/4544/

Magdy, A. S., Schmittner, C., Quirchmayr, G., Mohamed, A. B., Gruber, T., & Schikuta, E. (2019). Toward the ontology-based security verification and validation model for the vehicular domain. In. 26th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2019, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 12–15, 2019, Proceedings, Part IV, Springer International Publishing. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36808-1_57

Quirchmayr G., Buchegger B., Gerö S. (2016). Protecting Children and Women Against Online Dangers. In: Kury H., Redo S., Shea E. (eds) Women and Children as Victims and Offenders: Background, Prevention, Reintegration. Springer, Cham doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28424-8_23

• Academia plus Business Fund, a project in a program which provides support for scientists to turn a good idea into a viable business (AplusB 2016).
• Project eMentalistConnect, funded by eMentalist GmbH, a start-up company, 2016, contributing specific concepts for system components for content and trend analysis.
• Project MediaTrack, funded by FFG, in cooperation with eMentalist GmbH, a start-up company, 2017, contributing specific concepts for system components for content and trend analysis.
• Several projects within the FFG KIRAS framework, i.e.,
  CERT-Komm - Computer Emergency Response Team,
  Meta Risk - Meta-Risiko-Modell für kritische Infrastrukturen,
  LMK-MUSE - Modellbildungs-u.simulationsgestützte Entscheidungsunterstützung in der Last-Mile Katastrophenbewältigung,
  KIRAS RAGOUT - Risikoanalyse Güterverkehr - Organisation, Umsetzung und Technologien,
  KIRAS CERT Komm2 - Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Kommunikations-Modell II
  contributed to knowledge transfer towards public sector beneficiaries and industry partners.
• The Erasmus-SecTech (Innovation and Excellence in Cyber-Security teaching in Higher Education (KA2)) project provides methodologies, content, and infrastructure for the delivery of advanced information security content for educational institutions in Europe. By coincidence it is the infrastructure developed in this project which does in the current Coronavirus-crisis provide a valuable business continuity platform for security teaching and enables the uninterrupted communication in research projects.
• In 2017 the BlockchainSci-Lab: Blockchain Science, Technologies & Applications Lab, an Advanced Laboratory at the Faculty of Computer Science has been founded as a collaborative effort of several research groups, which contribute research activities related to blockchain technology and its applications. The BlockchainSci-Lab aims at investigating and exploring advanced topics on blockchain technology and its application. It serves various groups of interested parties, including students, researchers, companies, and governmental organizations.
• In 2017 the Steinbeis-Transferzentrum Informatik.univie (Steinbeis Transfer Center Informatik.univie) has been founded at the Faculty of Computer Science based on a University-wide legal cooperation agreement to establish technology transfer units at the university in cooperation with Steinbeis, Germany. Digital transformation and innovation are at the heart of the newly founded STZ Informatik.univie. In order to address the burning future questions of digital change together with our partners, the focus is on the innovation cycle between university and business / industry. The faculty actively supports the third mission of the University of Vienna and can help companies more easily generate benefits for their own areas of application from scientific knowledge and concrete research results.