The climate crisis has highlighted the environmental impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), underscoring the need for sustainable solutions to reduce carbon emissions from ICT. As video streaming continues to dominate Internet traffic, research in this field has become increasingly important. The energy consumption of OLED TVs relies on the video brightness. Thus, an approach to optimized the energy consumption is reducing the video brightness. In this work, we provide an open dataset for energy consumption in OLED TVs while playing videos with various brightness levels. The dataset comprises the energy data of four OLED TVs with different screen sizes and manufacturers in playing 176 videos in a range of dark and bright content. As results, 704 data traces of energy consumption are collected.

Recent years have observed a drastic improvement in video streaming. However, there are still non-trivial open issues that need to be solved, including latency and throughput estimation. A common approach is Low-Latency Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (LL-DASH) that utilises Common Media Application Format (CMAF) to reduce the latency. Currently, a new solution is being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that leverages QUIC protocol, called Meida-over-QUIC (MoQ) Transport. MoQ Transport is supposed to achieve even lower latency for large-scale systems. In this paper, we present a testbed to compare the performance of the up-to-date version of MoQ Transport and LL-DASH under various network conditions.

The generation of 3D views from 2D images has become an essential task in various fields such as 3D animation, computer vision and industrial digital twins. Over the past few years, novel view synthesis models, particularly neural-based approaches, have shown significant advantages over traditional photogrammetry techniques. Despite these advancements, evaluating and comparing different models remains challenging due to varying datasets, testing methodologies, and complex setup processes. To address these issues, we propose a flexible and scalable evaluation framework that facilitates the integration and comparison of both existing and novel 3D view synthesis models. This web-based framework simplifies dataset management and model evaluation through a user-friendly interface, supporting multiple input formats and state-of-the-art tools like COLMAP for dataset creation. It also integrates models such as Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and 4D Gaussian Splatting, enabling fair performance comparisons across different datasets and scenarios. These models are also evaluated regarding key aspects showing the usability and versatility of the framework.

Video streaming services have become integral to modern digital experiences, yet they present a challenge in balancing perceptual quality with energy efficiency. This paper presents a study on the impact of luminance changes in video streaming on the perceptual quality experienced by end users and the associated energy consumption. We investigate different luminance change scenarios and evaluate their effects using objective quality metrics and energy consumption measurements. The results demonstrate the trade-off between visual quality and energy efficiency in video luminance reduction. We found that the video luminance can be reduced by 8% with acceptable quality while saving nearly 11% energy consumption. In addition, common quality metrics react differently with the changes in video luminance, which implies a subjective test to find the best performant metric. Insights from this study have implications for video streaming service providers and device manufacturers aiming to optimize user experience and energy efficiency.

This paper presents a methodology for predicting VMAF video quality scores for high dynamic range (HDR) video content using machine learning. To train the ML model, we are collecting a dataset of HDR and converted SDR video clips, as well as their corresponding objective video quality scores, specifically the Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) values. A 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) model is being trained on the collected dataset. Finally, a hands-on demonstrator is developed to showcase the newly predicted HDR-VMAF metric in comparison to VMAF and other metric values for SDR content, and to conduct further validation with user testing.

Leveraging processing capabilities and resources in a network is a trending approach in accomplishing complex media processing tasks. At the same time, efficiently utilizing available resources while ensuring the potential for scalability and distribution is key. However, deploying, operating and maintaining such complex media service workflows on different cloud services, at the edge or on-premise can be a very complex and time-consuming task. In this paper, we will present an approach that addresses these challenges by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and standards for advanced multimedia services such as the MPEG Network-based Media Processing (NBMP) standard. We will apply the presented approach for implementing bandwidth reduction and optimization strategies by using context aware video encoding. Implemented as an automated NBMP workflow, the context aware encoding method with the support of machine learning models avoids computationally heavy test encodes. The models are trained on complex datasets composed of 40+ video attributes and generate an optimal encoding ladder as an output (bitrate/resolution pairs). In comparison to the conventional per-title encoding method, we observed significant savings in terms of storage and delivery costs, while maintaining the same visual quality.

Enterprise Mashups usually comprise services from different service domains that often differ vastly from each other regarding their protocols, data or programming models. This fact poses a challenge especially for non-professional developers who want to quickly create a complex service composition because they are required to know the technical details of the involved service domains in order to use them in their composite application. In this paper we describe an extensible framework that allows for enhanced interoperability of arbitrary service types by introducing a unified way to interact with disparate Web services and an intuitive model for handling heterogeneous data types within a composition. Our framework forms the basis for building extensive tool support for end-users that allows easy creation of Mashups with diversified services, collaboration with other users and distributed execution of a service composition.

The World Wide Web today underlies a number of trends and visions that will change the manner of using and browsing it in a significant manner. The Semantic Web, the Mobile Web, or the Web of Things are three of these visions that already have produced manifold approaches and concepts, which, amongst others, focus on context-aware applications as a use case. These applications have the potential of usefully linking legacy Web services and the personal area network of the user enabling novel services and tools. As an approach that combines and harmonizes these different trends, we propose the concept of contextual content browsing in this paper, i.e., a context-aware approach for Web browsing that utilizes personal information from the user to adapt Web pages while he or she is browsing. In this manner, personalized and context-aware Web content provisioning is enabled by connecting personal context sources and the Web browser. Accordingly, we propose a framework, markup language, and software components to enable our approach.

Evolving device capabilities and network technologies make the seamless combination of personal area and wide area networks capable and desirable to exploit advantages of each of the environments. By this, the vision of adaptive and context-aware service provision becomes possible and offers new opportunities for pervasive computing. In this paper, we describe an approach that addresses the convergence of personal area and wide area networks on the service level. We extend a middleware for mobile ad hoc networks to enable the remote access to personal multimedia content at home via a proper infrastructure and gateway. In a second step, we use this concept to enable the context-aware download of multimedia content to the mobile phone based on rules and a semantic blackboard approach.

The increasing device heterogeneity and mobility in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks make flexible and context-aware middleware approaches necessary to enable the user to benefit from this trend. Current approaches regarding ad hoc service or device interworking basically focus on seamlessly connecting discovered device functionality that is normally defined in respective static descriptions. At the same time, Web 2.0 technologies exemplify the success of collaboration based work, whereas the considered community aspects and interworking remain on user and data level only. In this paper, we propose an approach that expands the integration of community aspects to the service layer to enable a seamless interworking of different devices and services by applying semantics and Web 2.0 principles to P2P environments. The notion of universal service terminals is presented being able to process semantic user requests by means of multiple cooperating devices. Regarding this, a distributed blackboard approach is utilized to facilitate an active information exchange enabling a best-effort treatment of the user's goal and enhancing common functionality such as service discovery. Special emphasis is put on the support of handheld devices.

Within the last years, the Web has developed into a content platform featuring rich multimedia content, dynamic establishments of communities and a continuously increasing importance of interaction and communication. This trend reveals new challenges when considering the increasing mobility of users

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Social software systems have widely been employed in the process of online community forming in order to support collaborative user participation. Nevertheless, the discovery of people with the same interests or a similar context has still to be accomplished manually by the users themselves. Moreover, the inherent dynamic nature of community forming with regards to changing user interests and participation in a pervasive setting increases the needs to automatically adapt communities to the current situation of the user. We introduce a framework for the development of user-centric community platforms supporting the flexible and adaptive management of user communities. For this purpose, we make use of the collaborative synergies of social software and apply advanced features such as recommendation and personalization to realize self-organization of online communities

Smart environments and mobile computing systems increasingly converge, resulting in the emergence of pervasive computing environments. This development brings up new challenges that pertain to the variable availability and different mobility of heterogeneous services. Existing service interaction patterns in the area of service-oriented architecture (SOA) do not sufficiently address the changed requirements in those highly dynamic environments, which makes new approaches necessary. Our request-driven SOA approach for loosely coupled service provisioning addresses the unreliable and changing character of pervasive computing environments. It decouples interactions of service providers and requesters spatially, temporally, and semantically. The semantic data space, which is introduced in this paper, is one of the central elementary functions of the request-driven approach as it realizes the fundamental interaction model

Identifying correlations between context data, user behavior, and semantic information can lead to new services that are able to adapt to different situations. This "personalization" process can be based on recommendations on content. To better support service developers in focusing mainly on the creation of their service logic, these recommendations should be provided by a generic multipurpose recommender. Therefore, this paper proposes a generic framework that delivers "contextual recommendations" that are based on the combination of previously gathered user feedback data (i.e. ratings and clickstream history), context data, and ontology-based content categorization schemes. This paper provides a detailed overview of the specification, a short description of a possible usage scenario, and a discussion of the results

This work describes the mapping of a next generation mobile service infrastructure to the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). In the IST project MobiLife, a service infrastructure for the provisioning of next generation mobile services was specified, that supports service adaptation, context awareness, personalization, privacy and trust, operational management and miscellaneous features for service provisioning. This service infrastructure specification is represented by the MobiLife reference model. IMS on the other hand is an industrial relevant platform for telecommunication service provisioning and defines beside the core platform a set of service enablers. The mapping analysis presented here supports in applying the MobiLife service infrastructure to an existing IMS for telecommunication providers. First, the MobiLife reference model is introduced. Then, two possible mapping approaches are discussed, and the mapping of some MobiLife functions to IMS functionalities is described.

MobiLife (IST-2004-511607) and SPICE (IST-2005- 027617) projects research for new applications, services, platforms and related architectures to provide users with an excellent user experience within future communication environments. This paper gives an overview of the service and application space for next generation mobile service provisioning and presents the MobiLife service infrastructure and SPICE architecture principles.

In this paper we study the case of situational reasoning on ontological descriptions in context-aware applications. We therefore discuss the logical foundations of W3C's standard ontology language OWL and examine how this modeling language can be used to express a user's situation. In a practical scenario and through the use of standard semantic Web components and toolkits, we exemplify how basic reasoning services can be utilized to build and maintain well-founded context models.

Realizing services targeted to fixed network environments today is supported by a large number of environments that provide essential functionalities to service developers. However, developers of mobile services for 3G systems and beyond systems still challenge the problem of not being able to rely on a specific environment for mobile service provisioning. In ongoing research projects about future service scenarios and platforms we address this problem. The projects aim to provide mobile service developers a specification for an environment supporting personalization, context-awareness and service adaptation features through well defined interfaces, allowing them to realize ubiquitous services. This paper describes the basic building blocks of such a mobile service execution environment.

The vision of I-centric communications is one of the important and well-known paradigms for future ubiquitous user-centric services. Following this vision, the goal of the research project 'I-centric business communication tools (ICBCT)' is to realize a seamless computing environment and supporting tools for mobile workers and users. Context awareness, personalization, adaptation as well as communication support are identified as key features of the envisioned platform. The tools were implemented using YACAN (yet-another context awareness), which is a context awareness framework developed by NTT DATA. During the course of the project, YACAN are enhanced with features derived from the I-centric communications approach. This paper introduces the functional building blocks as well as the logical architecture of the resulting ICBCT platform. Based on this architecture two service scenarios was shown.

Research in ubiquitous computing showed the possibilities and advantages of deploying personalized and adaptive services in distributed environments. However traditional service creation burdens the users with proprietary device descriptions and service programming skills. New design paradigms, such as general frameworks based on an open cooperating objects standard enable seamless environments for creation, deployment, and execution of services. This open, distributed, and scalable platform supports the realization of evolvable services based on arbitrary combinations of cooperative objects. This paper introduces a system, which allows the adaptable creation, deployment, and execution of rule-based service descriptions. Thereby, services are customizable by the user and automatically adapted to changing environments.

Recent developments in mobile communication and small computing devices have had a tremendous impact on our societies. They have brought the dream of ubiquitous computing and communication closer to reality. In the near future the communication and computing devices will enable mass-market scale ubiquitous services and applications. The main challenge will be software that fulfils the needs of personalized, ambient-aware services and applications usable anywhere, anytime. A key enabler for this vision is personal networking supporting the communication in different kinds of environments: in personal domain, in ad-hoc communities, in digital home, in networks without any infrastructure as well as in networks with operator-based infrastructures.

Pervasive gaming, mobile gaming applications interleaved into the real world, is an emerging field for context-aware multimedia applications. Mobile multimedia applications are fostered by the improvement of hardware technology and the emergence of new devices with sufficient networking and processing capabilities. However, these extending possibilities also increase the complexity of software development due to the distributed mobile environment. This paper presents a framework enabling rapid development and easy deployment of scalable, context-aware multimedia applications for mobile environments. Subsequently, the development of "Cron", a pervasive game operating in the city area of Berlin, Germany, is introduced to prove the framework concept and demonstrate its features as well as potential for further research.

Thanks to the proliferation of multimedia devices, people can use multiple channels to access services nowadays. Service developers have to face the challenge of developing services for a huge amount of devices with diverse capabilities. Adapting multimedia services manually for several devices can not be a preferred solution, since this would make the service development process more expensive and time consuming. This paper presents a way to avoid re-authoring of service content through automatic service adaptation. It presents ADAPT, an architecture for multi-channel service delivery. ADAPT implements a service adaptation function that automatically transforms the markup language for generic user interaction (GUIML) to device specific user interface formats, taking heterogeneous device and network capabilities as well as user preferences into account. Thus, service users can employ multiple devices to access multimedia services, while developers don't have to take care about specific target devices for their services.

The vision of pervasive computing and communication will shape individual lives in the future. Following this vision, the goal of 'I-centric services based on super distributed objects' is to provide a seamless computing environment on the basis of users' individual communication spaces. It controls and manages large numbers of autonomous and decentralized objects (super distributed objects), in individual living or working spaces providing services that can adapt to users' individual requirements (I-centric services). This paper introduces the I-centric communications approach and identifies the requirements and design of super distributed objects as the paradigm for future pervasive and autonomous systems. Results of this project have been adopted by the World Wireless Research Forum (WWRF) and Object Management Group (OMG).