Dr. Hermann Hellwagner has been a full professor of computer science (more precisely of “systems integration”) at the University Klagenfurt since late 1998. He received his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) in 1983 and his Ph.D. (Dr.techn.) in 1988 (for research on systolic arrays), both from the University Linz. His current research areas of interest are distributed multimedia systems, multimedia communications, and Internet QoS. Current projects are on digital video communication, multimedia adaptation, and multimedia bit stream description techniques within the MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA) standardization effort. He is the editor of several books and publishes regularly on multimedia communications and adaptation in referred journals and conference proceedings. He has organized several international conferences and workshops. He is a member of the IEEE, GI, and OCG as well as the head of the Austrian delegation to the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG - ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11). Publications can be found under http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/~hellwagn/.

Dr. Christian Timmerer received his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) in January 2003 and his Ph.D. (Dr.techn.) in June 2006 (for research on the adaptation of scalable multimedia content in streaming and constraint environments) both from the Klagenfurt University. He joined the Klagenfurt University in 1999 and is currently a University Assistant (Univ.-Ass.) at the Department of Information Technology (ITEC) where he also chairs the IT administration group. At the university, he has been working on coding-format agnostic resource adaptation within the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework. Other research interests include the transport of multimedia content, multimedia adaptation in constrained and streaming environments, distributed multimedia adaptation, and Quality of Service / Quality of Experience. He has published more than 20 papers (incl. book chapters and tutorials) in these areas and participated in the work of ISO/MPEG for several years, notably as the deputy head of the Austrian delegation, coordinator of several core experiments, co-chair of several ad-hoc groups, and as editor for Parts 7 and 8 of MPEG-21, Digital Item Adaptation and Reference Software. Publications and MPEG contributions can be found under http://research.timmerer.com.

Dipl.-Ing. Michael Eberhard received his M.Sc. (Dipl.-Ing.) from the University of Klagenfurt in March 2008. In his master thesis, he evaluated approaches to perform adaptation of scalable bitstreams in streaming environments utilizing the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. In January 2008 he started to work at the department of information technology (ITEC) at the University of Klagenfurt in the scope of the P2P-Next project. The focus of his work is the integration of adaptation mechanism for scalable bitstreams into the P2P-Next system.