Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

"Omnipresent Multimedia – Pain and Gain of the Always Connected Paradigm"

Abstract: What we call the world wide web nowadays has its origins in a system designed to share and distribute information among scientists. It took less then a decade and “the web” evolved into an omnipresent medium for information sharing, communication and even collaboration and cooperation. This evolution was accompanied by advances in wireless network technologies, increasing capabilities of mobile devices and ongoing “digitalization” of all types of media. A multitude of new standards, protocols, and services has been proposed, some of them became a success, others died even before they had the chance to lift up. In the first part of this talk, we are going to reflect on the impact of omnipresent multimedia in many application domains. We will argue towards the need for rich media interaction, i.e. going beyond the classical multimedia formats of audio and video. We will highlight the importance of considering QoS in service development and deployment leading to a high level of user satisfaction. In the second part of this talk, we will critically reflect potential downsides of those trends, ranging from well known concerns about security and privacy to problems of information overload and the risk of prefering digital instead of human communication. The talk should end in a discussion on what we as the scientific community in computer science, can and should do to ensure beneficial and sustainable advances in technology.

Short Bio: Gabriele Anderst-Kotsis is holding a full professor position in computer science at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. She is chairing the Department of Telecooperation with a research focus in mobile computing, multimedia and hypermedia systems as well as cooperative and collaborative systems. Research in those areas includes the investigation of methods, techniques and tools for system development as well as evaluation and analysis with focus on performance evaluation. The Department is participating in numerous national and international projects, including CRUISE, a European network of excellence in sensor networks, EuroFGI, a network of excellence on Future Generation Internet, the AustrianGrid project, or ModelCVS a project on semantics in SW and system modelling, and actively involved in the organisation of international conferences, including for example iiWAS and MoMM. Prof. Anderst-Kotsis is author of numerous publications in international conferences and journals and is co-editor of several books. She is currently Member at large of ACM.