Simulating cyber-physical threats to the City of Vienna

A large number of critical infrastructure facilities are located in cities and their surroundings, providing essential services in a compact geographical space and resulting in mutual physical and logical dependencies. The provision of services such as electricity, gas, water, communication, food, fuel, road or rail, in particular, is achieved by operating extensive networks. In the FFG-funded project ODYSSEUS, Stefan Rass (Institute of Applied Informatics) and his team are working on developing a framework for a simulation designed to forecast the consequences of attacks on such interlinked infrastructure facilities.

Read more →

Europe’s largest Dronehall is open for business

Researchers investigating autonomous drones can now use a cutting-edge research infrastructure at the University of Klagenfurt, measuring up to 150 square meters and a height of ten meters. This is a tremendous boost for the “Drone-Hub Klagenfurt”, already known for hosting some of the world’s top players in the field.

Read more →

Automatic analysis of eye surgery

In many cases, modern ophthalmic surgery involves the video recording of surgical proceedings. The video material is either used for training purposes or for the subsequent reconstruction of operation sequences. Klaus Schöffmann has assembled a research team to work on the automatic recognition of relevant sequences within the scope of an FWF-funded project. Natalia Sokolova, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Information Technology, is a member of the project team and her work focuses on improving the search for particularly “relevant” surgical phases.

Read more →

Are we seeing genuine progress with recommender systems?

Recommender systems represent a key technology for e-commerce providers such as Google, Amazon, Netflix, Booking.com and Spotify. It is therefore with a certain urgency that researchers are working intensively on making ever more accurate predictions about the products and services users might want to consume next. However, in a paper published recently, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Paolo Cremonesi and Dietmar Jannach were able to show that several critical issues concerning the research methodology are hindering progress in the development of recommender systems. In recognition of their work, they received the Best Full Paper Award at the renowned ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Copenhagen in September.

Read more →