Focus

Our focus in the area of Blockchain systems is on techniques for extending existing approaches with dedicated support for (multimedia) content management. One possible approach would be to introduce additional layers for supporting a graph-based representation of content stored on the chain, and supporting the indexing and querying of this content by means of Web-based query languages.

A first prototype has already been implemented, and makes use of…

• RDF for representing the content, and
• SPARQL for querying it.

In addition, blockchain components such as the virtual machine for executing smart contracts may be separated from the traditional components and placed in the cloud, thus offering dedicated smart contract execution services for blockchain systems and their application(s). First experimental implementations already illustrate the feasibility of this approach.

As part of our ongoing research for the internally funded FactCheck project, we are researching novel approaches and a scalable system architecture for automatically detecting conflicting data/information on the Web. 

Our research is based on the observation that the vast, ever-growing volumes of data on the Web naturally lead to inconsistencies across web pages. Manually recognizing and resolving these inconsistencies requires substantial effort, and we envision FactCheck as a framework or toolkit that automates the context-aware comparison processes needed to support such endeavors. 

The conceptual foundation and prototypical implementation of FactCheck are based on the results of a PhD thesis that shows the feasibility of the concept in general, and we envision that FactCheck may become part of the well-established Web infrastructure. Planned and future extensions to this prototype will investigate various aspects, including…

• the design and setup of a scalable system architecture and framework based on the principles of edge computing - e.g., using concepts such as (server-less) functions as provided by Microsoft Azure or AWS Lambda.
• the integration of specific blockchain-based functionality for proofing the validity of conflicting data, which may ease the move towards a more trustworthy, transparent setting for detecting and resolving conflicts.
• novel approaches to extract, compare, and analyze information extracted from heterogeneous web sources.

Our students are actively encouraged to participate in the ongoing research on FactCheck via our open topics for practical courses and theses.

Based on current and submitted national and EU project participation, critical infrastructure protection and security awareness remain one of our core research foci. Supply chain security and related risk management topics will be addressed from an information security and a legal perspective. The submission of further national project proposals will lead to an even closer cooperation with leading research concentrations, such as AIT (Austrian Institute of Technology) and SBA (Secure Business Austria), especially in the area of cascading effects modelling in critical infrastructures, cyber exercises and cyber ranges. The results of these planned projects will also serve as a basis for starting new PhD projects.

Information security analysis and awareness creation will be addressed together with primarily European partners. Within the ASEA UNINET framework, an even closer cooperation with Thai universities will focus on natural language analysis and information integration for disaster management. A long-established partnership with Australian universities and institutions in the field of information management and security will continue, if possible, in the form of participation in joint cooperative research centers (Australian National CRC Program).

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 in 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.

Efficient response to IT security incidents in transnational supply chains (CONTAIN) explores technical, process, and organizational measures to reduce the impact of cyberattacks on supply chains and to increase resilience of the supply chain partners. 

In Austria and Germany, the number of cyber threats is on the rise and there have been cyber incidents in both countries that threaten the security of civil society. Cyber threats have the potential to cause long-lasting disruptions to businesses and entire supply chains; recovery is not always easy. As a result, such events can have serious consequences for individuals, businesses, and government organizations. Therefore, both Germany and Austria have invested significantly in corporate IT security in recent years, especially in critical infrastructure, partly under the influence of the EU's NIS Directive. The next step for both countries is to create awareness of how to respond to cyber incidents and to build competencies in this regard to restore the availability of services or critical infrastructures as quickly as possible in the event of a threat. 

The CONTAIN project aims to raise awareness of incident response topics and their subsequent processes, as well as their corresponding reference processes. It aims at the following three main aspects: (1) to reduce the impact of cyber-attacks, (2) to reduce the number and criticality of successful cyber-attacks, and (3) to increase the efficiency of cyber-attack detection. CONTAIN focuses on processes and procedures that are necessary to respond resiliently to IT security incidents, minimize their impact, remediate vulnerabilities, and increase the robustness and sovereignty of systems. For this purpose, CONTAIN plans to use serious games, i.e., games with a serious purpose, to challenge the behaviors of users and to analyze, define, and validate both operational and decision-making processes. In addition, there is a focus on developing and validating crisis management and coordinating actors together with their responsibilities within the supply chains. This information will be integrated into a simulation model to identify critical processes as well as potential bottlenecks in resources and capacity. Further, relevant possibilities to optimize processes will be derived, which are especially suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). 

Accordingly, joint research between Austria and Germany can help to establish the capabilities to be developed efficiently and effectively and to learn from each other in the course of this process. In this respect, the Austrian side benefits especially from the provision of scenarios and serious games by the German consortium as well as from the analytical competencies on virtual currencies and liquidity in crises. The German side benefits from a related analysis of cascading effects as well as perspectives from crisis management and crisis communication. Both consortia benefit from joint activities on the design and validation of serious games. Ultimately, the bilateral collaboration should help to identify and reflect on national procedures in crisis preparedness in order to achieve at better solutions. The application domains of the project are transport and traffic, which are classified as critical infrastructure in Germany, Austria and on an European level.

The primary objectives of the Collaborative Cybersecurity Awareness Learning (COLTRANE) project were multi-faceted and aimed at achieving several key outcomes: 

• Develop Innovative Pedagogical Approaches: The project sought to create innovative pedagogical and didactic approaches tailored specifically for universities. These approaches were designed with the overarching goal of enhancing awareness and improving the overall state of cybersecurity education.
• Inclusivity Across Disciplines: The project's objectives were not limited to technical or natural science fields but were inclusive across various academic disciplines. It aimed to benefit a broad range of students, including those pursuing Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD degrees in higher education institutions.
• Integration of New Technologies: The project aimed to leverage emerging technologies to implement these pedagogical concepts effectively. It highlighted the importance of combining new technologies to enhance the learning experience.
• Creation of a Digital Twin: A notable aspect of the project was the development of a digital twin comprising an interactive learning environment and practical exercises. These were facilitated through the use of a Cyber Range, a scalable virtual infrastructure. This technology was intended to simulate real-world incidents and environments, enriching the educational experience at higher education institutions.
• Skill Enhancement: COLTRANE aspired to equip both students and teachers with a diverse set of skills, encompassing both digital and non-digital competencies. This focus aimed to address qualification gaps and prepare individuals for a competitive international job market.
• Industry Alignment: Recognizing the demand for cybersecurity expertise in the job market, the project aimed to provide companies with personnel who had undergone comprehensive training and gained practical experience in applying cybersecurity concepts.
• Guidelines for Teachers: Teachers were not left out of the project's objectives. It aimed to provide guidelines for educators to integrate new technologies into their existing and new courses. Standardized teaching materials were emphasized to ensure consistency in educational goals among teachers.
• Fostering Multidisciplinary International Cooperation: The project aimed to create a foundation for multidisciplinary international collaboration. By establishing a common framework and goals, it sought to strengthen cooperation among institutions across Europe in the realms of teaching, cybersecurity, and awareness-raising. 

In summary, the COLTRANE project had ambitious objectives encompassing the development of innovative teaching methods, integration of cutting-edge technologies, enhancement of skills for students and educators, and the establishment of a collaborative community dedicated to advancing cybersecurity education and awareness on an international scale.

Cybersecurity is one of today's most challenging security problems for commercial companies, NGOs, governmental institutions as well as individuals. Reaching beyond the technology focused boundaries of classical information Technology (IT) security, cybersecurity includes organizational and behavioural aspects of IT systems and also needs to comply to the currently actively developing legal and regulatory framework for cybersecurity. For example, the European Union recently passed the Network and Information Security (NIS) directive that obliges member states to get in line with the EU strategy. While large corporations might have the resources to follow those developments and bring their IT infrastructure and services in line with the requirements, the burden for smaller organizations like local public administration will be substantial and the required resources might not be available. 

New and innovative solutions that will help local public administration to ease the burden of being in line with cybersecurity requirements are needed. For example, cooperation and coordination is one of the major aspects of the NIS and EU cybersecurity strategy. An enabling technology for cooperation and coordination is cyber situational awareness and information sharing of cyber incidents. In this project we propose a cybersecurity situational awareness solution for local public administrations that, based on an analysis of the context provides automatic incident detection and visualization, and enables information exchange with relevant national and EU level NIS authorities like CERTs. Advanced features like system self-healing based on the situational awareness technologies, and multi-lingual semantics support to account for language barriers in the EU context, are part of the solution.

The project FAMOUS (funded by WWTF) was investigating a radically different approach to context-based retrieval of very large video collections. Large video repositories often face the challenge of having to ingest new material without prior knowledge of its content. 

Currently, the screening, assessment, and filtering of potentially interesting sequences are tedious processes, and only feasible to do manually. Despite recent advances in computer vision, in most cases, existing media retrieval systems support only 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.

The project Object to Icon (O2I) was an interdisciplinary research project conducted jointly by the Institute of Egyptology and the research group Multimedia Information Systems at the University of Vienna. O2I was funded by the FWF, and based on its research on the former project MeKeTRE.

O2I dealt with the assessment and study of objects of Middle Kingdom tombs - comparing and contrasting their three-dimensional “existence” 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 in 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.

Cities and their agglomerations are home to a large number of critical infrastructures (CI) that provide essential services in a geographically narrow space and are thus physically and logically dependent on one another. This results in a sensitive network of organizations and connections in which incidents within an infrastructure can have an impact on the entire system. In particular, critical infrastructures in the context of utilities (electricity, gas, water, etc.), communication (ICT), distribution (food, fuel, etc.) and transport (road, rail, etc.) operate extensive networks which have special requirements with regard to security measures. Thus, a detailed risk analysis with a strong focus on the interaction of these networks and on potential cascading effects for the population represents a central aspect for the protection of these critical supply infrastructures, especially when considering the Network and Information Security (NIS) Law. Further, also the so-called "soft targets", i.e. attractive targets in public spaces for terrorist attacks, would have an impact on the above mentioned networks in case of an attack.

The goal of the ODYSSEUS project is to create a simulation-based, cross-domain risk model, based on the example of the City of Vienna, which describes the networks of the central supply infrastructures (electricity, gas, water, food and telecommunications, including ICT) as well as the transport networks (road and rail) up to a certain level of abstraction. This level should be kept as low as possible in order to achieve as real a representation as possible (depending on the quantity and quality of data available). Based on this model, potential threats (both natural disasters and man-made incidents) are simulated. In contrast to existing solutions from literature and practice, ODYSSEUS focuses on the dynamic relationships between networks and develops mathematical models from stochastics (e.g. Markov chains, probabilistic automata) for a realistic representation.

The central output of ODYSSEUS is a framework that enables a detailed assessment of the effects of threats both on individual critical infrastructures and on possible cascading effects within the entire network of critical supply infrastructures, taking into account the urban population. The simulations describe which potential compensation and displacement mechanisms can be expected within the multi-layered network of supply infrastructures or on public spaces in the event of an incident (intentional, technical or natural hazard). From this knowledge, targeted preventive safety measures can be derived, presented and evaluated in order to minimize the effects in the event of an incident when implemented.

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, and
3. state-of-the-art motivational techniques originating from gamification and motivational interviews to trigger a set of feedback tools that aim to change user habits toward healthier behavior.

The Academia plus Business Fund was a project in a program that provides support for scientists to turn a good idea into a viable business (AplusB 2016).

Project eMentalistConnect, funded by eMentalist GmbH, was a start-up company (est. 2016) that contributed to specific concepts for system components for content and trend analysis.

Project MediaTrack was funded by FFG and carried out in cooperation with eMentalist GmbH, was a start-up company (est. 2017) contributing specific concepts for system components for content and trend analysis.

During this time, several projects within the FFG KIRAS framework contributed to knowledge transfer towards public sector beneficiaries and industry partners. The projects in question are…

• CERT-Komm: Computer Emergency Response Team
• Meta Risk: Meta Risk Model for critical infrastructures (Meta-Risiko-Modell für kritische Infrastrukturen)
• LMK-MUSE: model-building and simulation-supported decision support in last-mile disaster response (Modellbildungs-u.simulationsgestützte Entscheidungsunterstützung in der Last-Mile Katastrophenbewältigung)
• KIRAS RAGOUT: risk analysis for freight transport - organization, implementation, and technologies (Risikoanalyse Güterverkehr - Organisation, Umsetzung und Technologien)
• KIRAS CERT Komm2: Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Communication-Model II (Kommunikations-Modell II)

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.

Coincidentally, it is the infrastructure developed in this project that, during the Coronavirus crisis, provided a valuable business continuity platform for security teaching and enabled 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, was founded as a collaborative effort of several research groups that conduct research on blockchain technology and its applications.

The BlockchainSci-Lab aims at investigating and exploring advanced topics on blockchain technology and its applications. It serves various groups of interested parties, including students, researchers, companies, and government organizations.

In 2017, the Steinbeis-Transferzentrum Informatik.univie (Steinbeis Transfer Center Informatik.univie) was 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 STZ Informatik.univie. In order to address the burning future questions and challenges of digital change together with our partners, the focus is on the innovation cycle between academia and business / industry. The faculty actively supports the third mission of the University of Vienna, and aims to help companies more easily generate benefits for their own application areas for scientific knowledge and concrete research results.