Peter Purgathofer is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology. He is Coordinator for the Media Informatics Master Program, and has a long experience researching, reflecting and teaching Interaction Design/User Experience in theory and practice, in a wide array of fields reaching from bank POS terminals to digital games.
Details of the keynote will be provided on time and for further information about Peter Purgathofer please visit his homepage.
Lake Wörth (Wörthersee), February 2013
Due to a reasonable number of requests, the deadlines for full and short papers will be extended as follows:
The changes are also reflected in the important dates section. For early birds, the submission site is open already. Please feel free to register your paper now and you can update it until the submission deadline. During paper registration and upload please make sure to select any topics that apply to your paper which shall ease the review assignments. Finally, please obey the author guidelines when submitting a paper to QoMEX’13.
The technical program committee (TPC) for QoMEX’13 is almost complete and can be found here.
The call for papers provides details concerning the topics of interest: Visual User Experience (Image/Video/Graphics), Auditory User Experience (Speech/Audio), Sensory User Experiences, QoE for Mobile Devices, QoE for 3D Multimedia, Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation, Quality Indicators and Uses, and Applications and Services.
This years’ edition of QoMEX comprises three special sessions on Affect and Physiology in QoE Research, QoE for Web and Cloud Applications, and Experiencing Immersive Audio.
Finally, QoMEX’13 contains a dataset track for sharing datasets/databases in the area of Quality of Experience which are hosted by the COST Action IC1003 QUALINET and in collaboration with the ACM Multimedia Systems dataset.
Detailed submission guidelines are provided for both full and short papers and don’t miss the important dates. For comments and questions please contact us.
Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Winter 2012/2013
Special Session Organizers: Karlheinz Brandenburg, Kristina Kunze, Stephan Werner
Immersive audio becomes more and more important in today’s multimedia applications and products. However, the user’s experience with immersive audio is not yet fully understood. Therefore, subjective evaluations are needed to assess the user’s perceptions and experiences. This special session will give some insight into the evaluation and perception of immersive audio. Additionally, this session will promote the discussion of audio related topics in the quality of experience community.
Karlheinz Brandenburg received Dipl. Ing. degrees from Erlangen University in Electrical Engineering (1980) and in Mathematics (1982). In 1989 he obtained his Ph.D. from the Friedrich‐Alexander University Erlangen‐Nuremberg in Electrical Engineering for his work on digital audio coding and perceptual measurement techniques. The research results of his dissertation are the basis of MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3), MPEG¬ 2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and most other modern audio compression schemes.
During his time with AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, USA from 1989 to 1990 he was working on ASPEC, the basis for MPEG‐1 Layer 3. In 1990 he returned to the University of Erlangen‐Nuremberg to accomplish further research within the field of audio coding. In 1993 he became head of the Audio/Multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen. Since 2000, Karlheinz Brandenburg is a full professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau Technical University. At the same time he is the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau.
Kristina Kunze studied Media Technology at Ilmenau University of Technology and received her Dipl.‐Ing. degree in 2009. Afterwards she started as researcher at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau
University of Technology and worked in the European project Mobile3DTV. She also worked part time at Fraunhofer Insitute for Digital Media Technology in the European project DIOMEDES. Her main research interests are audio/visual quality perception and their evaluation. She currently works in a research project about the evaluation of spatial audio quality in non‐standardized environments.
Stephan Werner studied Media Technology at Ilmenau University of Technology. He received his Master of Science (Diplom Ingenieur) in 2008 with the topic “Separation of useful signals from noise signals based on vesicle filtering in a neuronal auditory model”. In 2007 he was research assistant at Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Ilmenau. Since 2008 he is a research assistant at Ilmenau University of Technology at the Electronic Media Technology Lab. He aspires a PhD degree about “Effects in perception of auditory illusions”. The main research interests are binaural synthesis related with room acoustics, context dependencies, and perceptional evaluation.
First Snow in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Winter 2012/2013
Special Session Organizers: Katrien De Moor (iMinds-MICT, Ghent University), Robert Schleicher (Quality and Usability Lab, TU-Berlin), and Jan-Niklas Antons (Quality and Usability Lab, TU-Berlin).
Over the last years, the influence of emotions has increasingly gained importance in research on quality perception and Quality of Experience (QoE). Here, the focus has been broadened from a rather narrow, utility-oriented view to also include more hedonic and non-instrumental aspects, which means that more emphasis is put on affective states, their relation to human perception and judgment and their relation to QoE (as an outcome, a feature or an influencing factor). As a consequence, physiological measures for detecting and characterizing emotions are increasingly used as a complement to standardized subjective testing approaches. However, as the number of studies in that area is limited, the opportunities and limitations, promises and pitfalls of such measures for QoE are still unclear.
The main objective of this session is to allow researchers in that domain to present their experiences with different setups and studies focusing on human affect using physiological measurements and/or self-report measures in order to foster discussion on current problems and future research.
Katrien De Moor holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences: option Communication Sciences from Ghent University (2005). She is affiliated to the research group for Media & ICT (iMinds-MICT-Ghent University). Katrien has broad research interests and has worked on different aspects of user involvement in innovation research. Her main research activities are however situated in the domain of user-centered Quality of Experience. Mid December 2012, Katrien received her PhD degree from Ghent University in 2012, with her thesis entitled ‘Are engineers from Mars and users from Venus? Bridging gaps in Quality of Experience research: reflections on and experiences from an interdisciplinary journey’. In the COST Qualinet project, Katrien is leading the WP2 task force on Emotional State.
Robert Schleicher joined the Telekom Innovation Laboratories as a senior research scientist in November 2006. He received his diploma in psychology in 2003 (University of Bonn) and had been working at the department of clinical psychology at the University of Cologne, workgroup biological psychology, since then. From summer 2005 to 2006 he was additionally employed at the department of clinical and applied psychology at the University of Bonn where he held classes in biological psychology and maintained the psychophysiological lab. In 2008, he finished his PhD thesis on psychophysiology, eye movements and emotions at the University of Cologne.
Jan-Niklas Antons joined the Telekom Innovation Laboratories as a research scientist in January 2009 to pursue his PhD. He received his diploma in psychology in 2008 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany and has been doing research at the Quality and Usability Lab at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, since then. His research interests are in Quality-of-Experience evaluation and its physiological correlates with an emphasis on speech transmissions and human-machine-interaction, including neural processing of multimodal interaction. During summer 2012 he was visiting researcher at MuSAE Lab (INRS-EMT), Canada where examined neural correlates of quality perception for complex speech signals.
Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Winter 2012/2013
Special Session Organizers: Tobias Hossfeld and Lea Skorin-Kapov
Internet applications are often delivered with reliable transport protocols like TCP. As a consequence, the contents are not corrupted by the delivery over the Internet, since the protocol itself takes care of corrupted or lost packets. However, the available network capacity determines the user perception, e.g. the time for downloading a web site, video playback interruptions due to buffer underrun, etc. Most of the relevant stimuli in this domain are thus of temporal nature and have to be taken into account when web applications are delivered over the Internet. Hence, due to the technical implementation of web applications, novel stimuli need to be considered for QoE.
In a similar way, the technical implementation of cloud applications leads to novel kinds of artifacts and QoE issues. Cloud applications are typically also delivered via the Internet with reliable transport mechanisms. Thus, again temporal stimuli may influence and decide Cloud QoE. However, due to their distributed nature and resulting higher degree of complexity, QoE dependencies from factors such as network quality require dedicated research activities as they cannot be mapped from traditional application paradigms. Cloud gaming for example is per definition a gaming application, however, the game graphics may be rendered in the cloud and delivered as video stream to the end user (for several reasons). In the uplink direction, the user interacts with the cloud game and sends the gaming control commands. Hence, neither existing gaming QoE models nor video streaming QoE models are applicable. The same is true for other cloud applications, like office solutions, remote desktop applications, and collaborative applications. These kinds of interactions between end user and cloud have to be taken into account and the technology-driven impairments require new QoE models.
A key research question is to understand the effect on QoE when running that particular service on the cloud. For example, the distributed processing of data may cause novel kinds of artifacts and QoE issues such as temporal inconsistencies. In the case of media–applications sensitive to synchronization issues this may become an issue (e.g. game state in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with thousands of concurrent users on several geographically disperse servers). Due to the flexibility to compose new cloud services, novel influence factors on QoE e.g. viewing angle for personalized live 3D video streaming, or perceived presence for social–IPTV applications may emerge. Further, cloud-based processing enables advanced multi-modal interfaces e.g. based on combined voice and gestural interaction, requiring dedicated multi-model QoE models and metrics as well as mechanisms for distributed processing of sensor data-streams. In a generic Cloud service (i.e. not necessarily media-related) context, several factors affect the perceptual quality of the end user, ranging from the obvious e.g. (network performance, choice of platform, infrastructure capabilities) to the not-so-obvious (e.g. service load variability with time and geographical user distribution). Suitable ways to model and measure these factors are thus needed to feed QoE estimations.
Tobias Hossfeld studied computer science at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He finished his PhD on performance evaluation of future Internet applications and emerging user behavior in 2009. He is heading now the FIA research group Future Internet Applications & Overlays at the Chair of Communication Networks in Würzburg. He has been visiting senior researcher at FTW in Vienna with a focus on Quality of Experience research. His main research interests cover social networks, crowdsourcing platforms, content distribution networks and clouds, as well as investigations on Quality of Experience for Internet applications like Skype, YouTube, Web Browsing or cloud applications in general.
Lea Skorin-Kapov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb, Croatia where she received her PhD in 2007. She has over 8 years of previous experience in industrial research as a senior researcher and project manager in the R&D Center of Ericsson Nikola Tesla, Zagreb, Croatia, working in the areas of QoS signaling and negotiation for multimedia services. Her main research interests are related to QoE modeling of multimedia and Web-based applications, and negotiation and optimization of QoS/QoE in converged IP networks. She is a Croatian Management Committee member in COST IC1003 QUALINET, and participates in the Celtic+ QuEEN project.
Wörthersee, Winter 2012/2013
The Dataset Track is focused mainly on the following QoMEX’13 topic as part of its CfP:
Standardization Activities in Multimedia Quality Evaluation: Benchmarking efforts, multimedia databases/datasets of various modalities (speech, audio, video, sensory, etc.) and fidelities (quality, bitrate, etc.), testing conditions and methods (crowdsourcing), new objective metrics/models.
Through its Dataset Track QoMEX’13 provides a forum for researchers, practitioners, teachers, and engineers to share their datasets/databases in the area of Quality of Experience. Authors of databases/datasets of different sorts accepted for publication will receive hosting as part of the COST Action IC1003 QUALINET and citable publication as part of the QoMEX proceedings. Currently QUALINET provides online access through a wiki and a database (under development).
Datasets will be evaluated by the program committee on the basis of the collection methodology and the value of the dataset as a resource for the research community. Submission guidelines are the same as for regular papers, see QoMEX’13 author’s paper kit for details.
Important Dates:
Should you have any questions about the Dataset Track, please do not hesitate to contact Karel Fliegel.
Sunset Wörthersee, October 2012
As a general chair of QoMEX 2013 I woud like to welcome you to QoMEX 2013, the flagship scientific event of the COST Action IC1003 QUALINET . After San Diego (2009), Trondheim (2010), Mechelen (2011), and Yarra Valley (2012), QoMEX 2013 will be held in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria.
It is a pleasure to announce the preliminary call for proposals for full and short papers. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Additionally, QoMEX’13 will feature special sessions to cover case-studies, different topics joined under the specific framework of a research project, and technical and scientific advances in a specific QoE-related field of interest.
The tentative important dates can be found here and summarized in the following:
Finally, QoMEX’13 will host a dataset track where authors of databases/datasets of different sorts accepted for publication will receive:
Details regarding the conference will be posted online in due time. Please check this Website for further updates and/or subscribe to our newsletter 
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