Overview

Hearing, analyzing and evaluating sounds is possible for everyone. The reference-sensor for audio, the human ear, is of amazing capabilities and high quality. In contrast editing and synthesizing audio is an indirect and non-intuitive task needing great expertise.

To overcome these limitations we are creating Audio Brush, a smart visual audio editing tool. Audio Brush allows to edit the spectrogram of a sound in the visual domain similar to editing bitmaps. At the core is a very flexible audio spectrogram based on the Gabor analysis and synthesis. It gives maximum accuracy of the representation, is fully invertible, and enables manipulating the signal at any chosen time-frequency resolution.

From a developer unintended and not predictable states can cause self-organizing, emergent and thus autonomic systems at runtime to exhibit an unwanted and harmful behavior due to wrong self-adaption. The objective of the AWACS project is to proactively determine such critical system states at runtime before they occur as well as to avoid the unwanted behavior by means of appropriate self-adaption mechanisms.

The goal of ECIDISI is to analyze the current requirements engineering processes using a fictive scenario of a company from two different viewpoints: the first viewpoint is the one of a software engineer of a software development department and the second one of a technical writer from a documentation department. Using these different viewpoints the concrete problems that companies have today should be evaluated and existing modeling methods are systematically explored and tested. Based on that a methodology will be developed and implemented in order to represent the different goals and views and to (re)use the documents in later steps of the development. Additionally the usage of semantic technologies for requirements engineering (annotating documents) and their added value for lated process steps will be evaluated.

It is nowadays very common that public places such as pubs, restaurants, and fitness club have large TV screens to entertain their customers -- especially during national or international sports championship events. For the venue owner it would be desirable if they could control which commercials are shown to their audience. In other words they may have the desire to replace untargeted commercials by target commericals of their choice.

In this joint project with Half Minute Media Ltd. we research algorithms for robost real-time commercial detection and control (such as replacement) in live streams. We are especially developing fast and extremely reliable algorithms for

• Mining video channels automatically in order to extract all commercials and
• Detecting known commericials in live streams using highly compact, but discriminate clip descriptors

The availability of high-performance and low-cost desktop computing systems and digital camera equipment has given rise to a public interest towards applications that include the visual identification of human individuals. Examples for such applications are surveillance, biometrical identification or computer-human interaction. To that effect, research in biometrical technologies follows naturally. Above other methods, images of human faces offer a non-intrusive and easy-to-use means of identification. Although the recognition of faces is a problem that is effortlessly solved by human beings during their daily routine, it poses a challenge for researchers and scientists. Boundary conditions like illumination and occlusion, as well as pose and expression of an individual lead to intrapersonal variations that often exceed those between images of different persons under similar conditions.

In association with Falcontrol Security GmbH we are researching reliable face recognition algorithms by using Bayesian methods on infrared image data.

The Eclipse Java Workflow Tooling (JWT) project is an open-source subproject under the Eclipse Technology Project.
For more information please visit the project web site under www.eclipse.org/jwt.

Mobile communication is based on highly complex network architectures requiring frequent (re)configurations of network elements. In this project a concept is developed for reducing management complexity and raising the degree of automation in mobile networks. For this purpose, policy-based techniques are applied, which enable the management system to take decisions autonomically by correlating events, conditions, and actions. Thus, human knowledge is encapsulated in a machine-executable way, thereby reducing the amount of work and time to be spent by human operators for operation, administration and maintenance of the network.

Software engineering has advanced essentially. The two major concepts are the change from imperative to object-oriented programming languages and the introduction of service-oriented architectures. During this process powerful instruments have been created to industrialize software construction. As a consequence, complex applications can be realized with a fractional amount of manpower.

The main intention of the project SoftRobot is to transfer these two concepts to industrial robotics. Therefore, a new software architecture for controlling industrial robots will be developed. The combination of modern software paradigms and the consideration of hard real-time is an innovative approach. The resulting reference architecture can change the development in industrial robotics tremendously.

Moreover, an intuitive and graphical development environment for engineering robotics software will be created. Traditionally, programming an industrial robot requires profound knowledge and needs to be performed by an expert. Nowadays graphical development tools enable non-experts to create complex software products. However, the approaches in robotics are only rudimental and will be extended to a graphical programming language during the project.

The project is performed in cooperation with KUKA Roboter and MRK Systeme and funded by Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft, Infrastruktur, Verkehr und Technologie (StMWIVT).