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Federated Online Social Network Monitoring - available

The Mastodon network - currently

4.4 million

around 1.5  million monthly active accounts on +

4000

10000 servers - is regarded as the most successful alternative online social network yet:

https://joinmastodon.org

Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok - this service is NOT based on manipulative strategies like targeted advertising and algorithmic outrage maximisation - which are posing imminent threats to democracies worldwide - and for this reason, the network keeps evolving rapidly.

→ However, its decentralized nature creates exciting challenges for monitoring "network health".

Your task is to:

  1. Conduct research on the current state-of-the-art in monitoring of federated network statistics (e.g. nr. of posts per instance over time, blocking events, outages...)
  2. Apply your insights and ingenuity to help improving the situation, e.g.
    1. Aggregation of publicly available statistical data (via mastodon server APIs)
    2. Setup a public monitoring service directory - similar to https://instances.social/list/advanced#lang=&allowed=&prohibited=&min-users=&max-users=
    3. Propose new ideas on "how to measure network health" of a federated online social network

Further reading: https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon

Further watching:

Widget Connector
urlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuKtXfuWsuY

Further watching: https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-857362-die_rosarote_brille_des_fediverse


If you are interested in the future of online social networking systems (democratically legitimised moderation and algorithms + resistance against spam, censorship, denial-of-service...) then this topic may be something for you (smile)

If you're interested, please contact Paul Fuxjäger (paul.fuxjaeger(at)univie.ac.at).

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Markdown for Questionnaires - available

(For some context of Markdown, see above :-)

The plan for this topic is:

  1. Develop a syntax that extends Markdown to allow for a simple, text-based description of questionnaire elements such as checkboxes, lists to choose from, percentage sliders, and free-text fields.
  2. Devise a way to render such source files to HTML forms, potentially implemented as a web-based editor with live preview, and
  3. Connect them with existing Web survey software such as LimeSurvey.

The topic includes a survey and comparison of existing tools and literature on (online) surveying, a usable implementation, and a qualitative evaluation with prospective users of the technology.

If you're interested, please contact Albert Rafetseder (albert.rafetseder@univie.ac.at)


Pure Data Software Engineering Best Practices - available

Pure Data is a visual language for multimedia computing. Pure Data programs, usually called "patches", may use various software engineering techniques such as modularization to achieve better readability, reusability, and maintainability. There exist some established patterns. Yet, there is little introductory literature on on them. In this project, you research the existing material such as public patches and libraries, Pure Data's own documentation system and included examples, and your own experience creating programs in this (and other) programming language(s). The outcome of the project is a set of well-documented worked examples of good software engineering practices in Pure Data.

Participation and research intervention in our current course Network-based Communication Ecosystems is possible – you are invited to include our students in your research. We can also connect you with the international community of Pure Data users and developers for further investigation.

If you're interested, please contact Albert Rafetseder (albert.rafetseder@univie.ac.at)


iLO Hacking - available

Server hardware includes management interfaces to remote-control the hardware and BIOS of a server even if the main operating system or hypervisor becomes inaccessible through usual means such as ssh. For this, a fully separate embedded system is built into the server. It provides its own operating system, RAM, storage, a separate physical Ethernet port, and low-level access to the running server hardware (e.g. fan and power supply status) and software (e.g. main memory of the server).

Little is known about the actual software comprising these management interfaces, although mostly-informal investigations have been conducted, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

If you're interested, please contact Albert Rafetseder (albert.rafetseder@univie.ac.at)


A Configurable Études Generator - available
Études are musical pieces designed as practice materials for perfecting particular musical skills (Wikipedia). The skills to be perfected can differ (in difficulty and category) from étude to étude, and are different between instruments, players, and also dimensions of musical content (melody, harmony, rhythm). Develop a sufficiently generic, configurable generator for études that outputs études of choosable difficulty. For this, define a system that encodes the difficulty of a task to be studied, and transformations that assess the difficulty of combinations of study tasks appropriately.
If you're interested, please contact Albert Rafetseder (albert.rafetseder@univie.ac.at)

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