Digital Formalism: The Vienna Vertov Collection focuses on the computer-aided digital analysis of the¿senses of cinema¿. On the foundation of theoretical basic research on digital formalism we will develop the technical tools to digitally analyse the principal cinematic elements in the films by Russian Avant-Garde film maker Dziga Vertov (1896 ¿ 1954) with the aim of a) applying the tools developed for this important oeuvre to certain cultural industries branches like graphics design, creative advertising etc. and of b) making the worldwide unique Vienna Vertov Collection, which contains film material, scripts, photographs etc., accessible for both the general public and the internationalVertov research community. Core piece of the project is the development of tools for the computational understanding of media aesthetics, inspired by Vertov¿s work, which is in its availability at the Austrian Film Museum exclusive in quality. Computational understanding comprises the automated extraction of high-level film elements such as rhythm, contrast, dialogue sequences, etc. The involved film analysis scientists and media processing scientists will work hand in hand and thus ascertain the interdisciplinary merging of film theory, advanced digital technology and materiality of film.

Electronic resources are a central part of our cultural and intellectual heritage; but this material is at risk. Digital memory needs constant management, using new techniques and processes, to contain such risks as technological obsolescence. Risk begins before the digital record is created and continues for as long as the digital object needs to be retained. Digital preservation is too big an issue for individual institutions or even sectors to address independently. Concerted action at both national and international level is required. DigitalPreservationEurope facilitates pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration, and industry sectors in Europe.DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national initiatives across the European Research Area. DPE addresses the need to improve coordination, cooperation and consistency in current activities to secure effective preservation of digital material drives DPE. DPE¿s project partners lead work to: (a) raise the profile of digital preservation; (b) promote the ability of Member States acting together to add value to digital preservation activities across Europe; (c) use cross-sectoral cooperation to avoid redundancy and duplication of effort; (d) ensure auditable and certificated standards for digital preservation processes are selected and introduced; (e) facilitate skills development through training packages; (f) enable relevant research coordination and exchange; (g) develop and promote a research agenda roadmap; and (h) help both citizens and specialist to professionals recognise the central role that digital preservation plays in their lives and work. DPE¿s success will help to secure a shared knowledge base of the processes, synergy of activity, systems and techniques needed for the long term management of digital material.

Collaboration of distributed knowledge communities is a rapidly increasing application field, e.g. international enterprises, scientific research teams, e-learning communities. For efficient collaboration the common understanding of information is a decisive factor.A systematic approach to gain this common understanding is the dynamic creation of ontologies, leading to a more efficient use of shared information resources.

Typical approaches to business process management capture what a company wants to do. In contrast, process mining reveals what a company is actually doing by discovering and analyzing business processes based on event logs. So far, process mining approaches have concentrated on the internal business processes of companies. The project EDImine seeks to extend current process mining approaches in order to apply them to inter-organizational business processes.Choreography modeling and service integration have been well researched in current literature. In contrary, real-world implementations of inter-organizational systems are still (and will be for some time) realized by traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards. In traditional EDI standards, the notion of process or choreography is not explicitly specified. Rather, every business document exchange stands for its own.Thus, the first research question is, whether we are able to derive the choreography of an inter-organizational business process based on the EDI messages that are interchanged between companies. The second research question deals with the fact that a set of EDI message exchanges (request for quote, order, invoice, etc.) comprises a lot of redundantly transferred business information carried out in the same business case. In practice, every piece of redundantly transferred information elevates the risk of semantic heterogeneity, since each involved business partner has to support its processing. Moving towards a choreography-based approach for EDI systems, however, presupposes only the communication of the appropriate"delta"of business information in order to handle the next step in the process. Thus, our second research question is whether we can identify the minimum as well as the redundant part of information that is communicated in the course of a discovered EDI process.Finally, the EDImine project seeks not only to mine the interaction sequences between the partners, but also to derive business decisions from the obtained information. This goes beyond current state-of-the-art in process mining, since it combines process information and business-relevant data. Hence, EDImine's third research question is whether we can lift the information gained on the IT level (from the event logs as well as from the messages) to the business level. The goal is to answer questions not only regarding interaction performance, but also with respect to business performance. Combining interaction with business performance leads to new insights into the"value"of business partnerships. By dealing with the three research questions outlined above, EDImine's objective is to support companies in decision making with respect to their inter-organizational relationships.

During the last few years, stereo matching has experienced a significant advance with the introduction of new optimization algorithms. Energy minimization methods based on these optimization schemes currently show the best performance in stereo computation. However, while a lot of research effort has been put into the optimization problem of the energy minimization approach, the fact that the energy functions under consideration might represent an unsatisfactory model for the stereo problem has often been ignored.In the proposed project, we aim at pushing the state-of-the-art in stereo vision by investigating and improving the modelling component of energy minimization techniques. One major contribution to the stereo community is that we will run a competitive performance evaluation among energy functionsthat have been proposed in the literature. Energy functions are typically combinations of several terms that are motivated by the same idea, but differently implemented in each approach. Moreover, the resulting energy functions are minimized using different optimization algorithms. It is therefore difficult to judge why one approach outperforms the other. In the proposed project, we will implement a framework that unifies several energy functions and accounts for their minimization. This framework will serve as the basis for a benchmark test, in which we will use image pairs of real scenes along with ground truth disparities. The goal of our experiments is to identify which components of an energy function result in a performance improvement and which do not. This will lead to a new and deeper understanding of current energy functions and point out those factors that show the highest potential for further improvement. In the second phase of the project, we will use the knowledge gained in our evaluation study to develop novel energy functions. These energy functions will be designed to deliver high-quality disparity maps that improve over the current state-of-the-art. These high-quality disparity maps are vital for a variety of applications, ranging from quality assurance, robotics and virtual reality to promising applications in the entertainment industry such as novel view synthesis.

In this diploma thesis challenges and problems of business process management in general are investigated and a classification of organizations and their business processes is performed. Further the existing software of ISIS Papyrus is analyzed in regard of its potential and restrictions for business process management.

We evaluate a method for generating virtual views derived from stereoscopic film material regarding the visual quality (e.g. image artifacts) and possible ways for improvement.

Technical evaluation on live webcam videoconferencing systems

Like traditional program code, software models are not resistant to change, but evolve over time by undergoing continuous extensions, corrections, and modifications. In model-driven engineering (MDE), evolution is multidimensional leading to the model management tasks of synchronization, versioning, and co-evolution. Whereas each of these tasks has recently received increased research interest, a systematic comparison and evaluation of the different approaches is missing. Within the FAME project, we aim at establishing a uniform framework characterizing changes and their impacts. The resulting findings will provide the basis for a suite of efficient techniques for avoiding unexpected side-effects of evolution. We will use different, well-explored formalisms with powerful inference engines exploiting concise semantic definitions of the modeling languages. By this, FAME will contribute to reliable change propagation indispensable for automatic quality assurance in MDE.