A paper Dynamic reconfiguration in multigroup multicast routing under uncertainty by our colleagues Pavel Troubil, Hana Rudová and Petr Holub has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Heuristics. The paper is based on the main results of Pavel’s doctoral thesis and deals with the problem of multi-group multicast routing for high quality multimedia transmissions and collaborative environments. The paper introduces a novel algorithm based on the ant colony optimization metaheuristic which efficiently deals with uncertain knowledge of the underlying network, supports on the fly transcoding of the media transmitted in the multicast tree and allows for its dynamic reconfiguration when minimal changes are desirable.

We continue to support the live cases transmissions at the congresses held by the Czech Society of Cardiology. We have deployed UltraGrid for interactive transmissions of interventional cardiology cases from the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine in Prague and from the teaching hospital in Hradec Králové. A part of the programme was also an open heart surgery we have transmitted from the teaching hospital in Hradec Králové.

In all cases we have transmitted a live cases video including the imagery from variety of instruments and allowed for live and very interactive discussions over the live cases content between the workshop or congress chairs and participants and the surgeons and specialists conducting the cases in the remote hospitals.

We continue to support local medical communities by bringing live transmissions of cardiology interventions to the specialists from the local hospitals in the South Moravian region of the Czech republic. We have transmitted three cases during the St. Anne 2017 cardiology workshop including a not planned transmission of acute heart attack treatment. From a technical point of view, we are starting to bring HEVC video coding into production with the UltraGrid to allow for higher video quality on commodity network links available especially in local hospitals.