GAIA

Intelligent Climate-Friendly Video Platform

GAIA (Greek goddess of Earth, mother of all life, personification of the Earth) is a project:

Project Description

A growing number of digital technologies require power to run. Video streaming technology is responsible for more than half of digital technology’s global impact. In this context there is rapid growth, also now with remote and digital work becoming more mainstream, in the amount of video data volume, processing of video content, and streaming which affects the rise of energy consumption and its associated global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The GAIA project researches and develops a climate-friendly adaptive video streaming platform that provides:

  • Complete energy awareness and accountability, including energy consumption and GHG emissions along the entire delivery chain, from content creation and server-side encoding to video transmission and client-side rendering;
  • Reduced energy consumption and GHG emissions through advanced analytics and optimizations on all phases of the video delivery chain.

The objectives of GAIA

 

Awards

  1. CSI Magazine Award for Best Sustainability Project or Initiative to GAIA

Publications

  1. Christian Bauer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Narges Mehran (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt),Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt) and Dragi Kimovski (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “Machine Learning Based Resource Utilization Prediction in the Computing Continuum“, IEEE International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (acceptance rate: N/A; quality factor: N/A) [pdf] [slides]
  2. Vignesh V Menon (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Reza Farahani (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Prajit T Rajendran (Universite Paris-Saclay), Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Klaus Schoeffmann(Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “Energy-Efficient Multi-Codec Bitrate-Ladder Estimation for Adaptive Video Streaming“, VCIP 2023: International Conference on Visual Communications and Image Processing, (acceptance rate: N/A; quality factor: N/A) [pdf] [slides]
  3. Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Narges Mehran (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Sandro Linder (Bitmovin), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), and Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “VE-Match: Video Encoding Matching-based Model for Cloud and Edge Computing Instances“, ACM MMsys, GMSys workshop (2023) (acceptance rate: 66.7%; quality factor: N/A) [pdf] [slides]
  4. Hadi Amirpour (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Vignesh V Menon (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt),  and Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “Optimizing Video Streaming for Sustainability and Quality: The Role of Preset Selection in Per-Title Encoding,” IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Expo (ICME) (2023) (acceptance rate: N/A; quality factor: I)[PDF][Slides][Video]
  5. Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Austria), Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt, Austria), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt and Bitmovin Inc., Austria), “Green Video Streaming: Challenges and Opportunities“, ACM SIGMultimedia Records [PDF]
  6. Narges Mehran (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt) and Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “CNN-assisted Road Sign Inspection on the Computing Continuum,” 2022 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), DML-ICC workshop, Vancouver, WA, USA, 2022, pp. 201-206, doi: 10.1109/UCC56403.2022.00038, (acceptance rate: N/A; quality factor: N/A) [PDF] [Video]
  7. Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Zahra Najafabadi Samani (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Narges Mehran (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), and Radu Prodan (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt), “MPEC2: Multilayer and Pipeline Video Encoding on the Computing Continuum,” IEEE Network Computing and Application (NCA 2022),  (acceptance rate: N/A; quality factor: N/A) [PDF] [Slides].
  8. Samira Afzal (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria), Vanessa Testoni (unico IDtech, Brazil), Christian Esteve Rothenberg (University of Campinas, Brazil), Prakash Kolan (Samsung Research America, USA), and Imed Bouazizi (Qualcomm, USA), “A holistic survey of multipath wireless video streaming“, Journal of Network and Computer Applications (impact factor:7.574; quality factor: Q1) [PDF]

Talks

  1. Samira Afzal and Vignesh V Menon talk at VQEG, June 26 to 30, 2023, GVFR: Green Variable Frame Rate Encoding for Adaptive Live Streaming, [slides]
  2. Samira Afzal talk at 10th FOKUS Media Web Symposium, Exploring the Energy Consumption of Video Streaming: Components, Challenges, and Opportunities,  [slides]
  3. Samira Afzal talk at ICT4S Workshop: Towards Sustainable and Energy-Aware Video Communications (SEViC), Energy Consumption in Video Streaming: Components, Measurements, and Strategies [slides]

Events and presentations

  1. GMSys 2023: First International ACM Green Multimedia Systems Workshop [Report], [CFP]

Press releases/coverage

Team members

Christian Timmerer (head of ATHENA) is a full professor of computer science at Klagenfurt University, Institute of Information Technology (ITEC). He is a Co-Founder of Bitmovin Inc. where he is the Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) and the Head of Research and Standardization. His research interests include immersive multimedia communication, streaming, adaptation, and quality of experience. Further information is available here.

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Radu Prodan is a full professor of computer science at Klagenfurt University, Institute of Information Technology (ITEC). Previously, he was an associate professor with the University of Innsbruck, Austria.  He participated in numerous projects and coordinated the European Union projects ARTICONF and Graph-Massivizer. He has co-authored more than 200 publications and received three IEEE best paper awards. Further information is available here.

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Samira Afzal is a postdoctoral researcher at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and in collaborating with Bitmovin. Before, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sao Paulo, researching deeply on IoT, SWARM, and Surveillance Systems. She graduated with her Ph.D. in November 2019 from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). During her Ph.D., she collaborated with Samsung on a project in the area of mobile video streaming over heterogeneous wireless networks and multipath transmission methods in order to increase perceived
video quality. Further information is available here.

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Christian Bauer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Information Technology (ITEC) at the Alpen-Adria Universität (AAU) Klagenfurt and has also received his M.Sc. in Informatics in 2023 from AAU Klagenfurt. He is currently working in the Christian Doppler Laboratory ATHENA and his current research interests are energy consumption in multimedia streaming, machine learning and computer vision. Further information is available here.

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Zoha Azimi is a Ph.D. candidate at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. She received her first M.Sc. in electrical engineering (telecommunications) from the Iran University of Science and Technology and her second M.Sc. in artificial intelligence in 2023 from the University of Bologna working on multi-step ahead energy demand forecasting in industrial applications. Her research interests include AI applications in energy prediction and sustainability. Further information is available here.

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