Efficiency in the great big data cloud

Every minute, video material amounting to roughly 400 hours of viewing time is uploaded to YouTube. Users watch one billion hours’ worth of videos every single day, according to the channel’s own statistics. This data traffic between the YouTube “cloud” and the terminal devices, more than half of which are mobile devices, requires efficient organisation. The computer scientist Radu Prodan specialises in the efficiency aspects of these distributed and parallel systems. In the following interview, he discusses the possibilities and impossibilities that still lie ahead and that present enormous challenges for technology, humankind, and nature.

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Pursuing the research objective of a more unified and democratic social media ecosystem

Facebook, Twitter and Co. are centralised platforms that are owned by private corporations and that control the respective networks unilaterally. An international project financed by EU-H2020 under the project leadership of Radu Prodan (University of Klagenfurt) aims to create a decentralised social media ecosystem using blockchain technology.

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Can novels make us care about others? A study based on ethnic American literatures

When President Donald Trump addresses the nation, he often resorts to discriminatory stereotypes when referring to African American, Mexican American and Muslim American communities. The narrative that suggests that these groups represent a threat to the American nation is shaping a number of current debates, but there are also important counternarratives. Within the scope of a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), scholars from the field of American Studies are investigating how ethnic American literary texts are inviting readers to imaginatively step into the shoes of a character who is different from themselves and to see the world through that character’s eyes.

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Conflict as part of a European democracy

The EU H2020 project TRACES combines the spheres of the arts and science to encourage the joint development of new discussion spaces dedicated to contentious and painful historical events, the effects of which continue to unfold, even today. The project, which has now entered the last of three stages, has been awarded the “European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018 (EYCH) label”. In this interview, project co-ordinator Klaus Schönberger, professor at the Department of Cultural Analysis, talks about the insights that have been gained so far.

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