The ARTICONF consortium
Universitaet Klagenfurt (UNI-KLU), Austria
Universität Klagenfurt (UNI-KLU) is a young, lively, innovative university located in the Austrian state of Carinthia, a meeting point of three cultures. UNI-KLU is Carinthia’s largest academic institution and a hub for the whole of the Alps-Adriatic region in terms of knowledge acquisition, exchange and transfer. The university’s lively, diverse atmosphere and sense of openness forms the cultural centre for this region. Teaching at UNI-KLU is of exceptional teaching quality and, offering a range of degree and continuing education programmes. There are over 10,000 students studying and researching at UNI-KLU, with 1300 programmes of study and 400 continuing education programmes completing each year.
SMART — Semantic model with self-adaptive autonomous relevant technology
Multi-faceted, cross-contextual community-detection and democratic decision-making.
SMART adapts and responds to dynamic social media needs and requirements, enabling multi-faceted, cross-contextual community-detection and democratic decision-making. The model facilitates understanding and predicting the behaviour of users without the need to know personal information about them. Additionally, it helps end-users understand the platform and its changing trends without violating privacy principles. With the SMART tool, users know whom they can trust; engage with relevant groups and services, and be rewarded for collaborative participation in social media activity.
SMART provides a semantic contextualisation, abstraction and democratic-decision making framework capable of finding and building socially-entrusted interest group communities.
This can contribute to building trustworthy communities for a fair social media driven next-generation internet. [1]
Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), Netherlands
University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the largest university of the Netherlands and a core member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU). The Faculty of Science at UvA embeds a concentration of e- Science development and application groups, benefiting from its central position in the Amsterdam Science Park. Science Park holds the main European Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), one of the SURFnet core locations (which includes the optical network exchange NetherLight), the national supercomputer and Grid centre (Surf-SARA), and a number of Dutch Science Organisation institutes. The university contributes to innovation in computer science with its Institute of Informatics and Institute for High Performance Computing and Advanced Network that collaborates with the national BigGrid initiative at advancing state-of-the-art in advanced virtual infrastructures.
CONF — Co-located and Orchestrated Network Fabric
CONF enables managing social network innovations across distributed Cloud infrastructures.
Enabling management of social network innovations across Cloud infrastructure, and make decentralized social network application deployment, optimization and operation easier in Cloud environments.
This tool bridges the gap between businesses and operational services by automating the deployment, execution and runtime adaptation of IT services across distributed Cloud infrastructures.
Cloud has a profound impact on how we source, develop, run and secure IT solutions across DIGIT and beyond [1]. Analyses indicate that for 98% of businesses, the failure of cloud deployment applications, e.g., one hour of downtime results in losses of at least 100K USD [2]. Automated seamless solutions for quality critical Cloud application deployment, monitoring, and adaptation enables business service operators to minimize failure time of their Cloud deployed applications. For the end-users, social media applications’ quality of service brings a fundamental benefit.
University of Information Science and Technology (UIST), Republic of North Macedonia
University of Information Science and Technology (UIST) “St. Paul the Apostle” is a higher education state institution located in Ohrid, Republic of North Macedonia. UIST is committed to providing excellence in education and research in the field of information sciences and technology. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked UIST third out of 20 universities and other high education institutions in the country. UIST offers innovative contemporary study programs based on best practices of instructions used in some of the leading universities in USA, Europe and Australia. The university has professional personnel that possess extensive experience in the preparation and realisation of scientific research activities and publications in renowned international conferences and journals.
TAC — Tools for Analytics and Cognition
Guided analytics for aggregation, cognition, and interactive visualization, providing users’ engagement rate and return on collaborative insights.
TAC embraces development of techniques that improve efficiency and inject intelligent insights into operational and mission-critical social media businesses through guided visualytics.
Using visualization models, TAC aims to provide a boost to the EU’s collaborative economy goals measured through its novel ROC (Return on Collaboration) metric.
Social media data contain rich information about user activity. If those data can be extracted and visualized properly, companies can fully utilise this source of information. They can then convert data into useful information or knowledge, which can help to formulate effective business strategies. TAC is designed to improve efficiency and inject intelligent insights into operational and mission-critical social media businesses through guided visualytics. [1] [2] [3] [4]
University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), United Kingdom
The Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN), is part of the School of Social and Political Science, one of the largest Schools within the University of Edinburgh and one of the premier research units in the UK. The school is home to the MSc program in Digital Society, which focuses on the sociological study of digital society and digital culture. The Digital Society research cluster focuses on core theoretical and methodological issues arising when sociologists investigate the increasing prevalence of digital technology, digital infrastructure, and data production, capture, and analysis in everyday life.
TAC — Tools for Analytics and Cognition
Guided analytics for aggregation, cognition, and interactive visualization, providing users’ engagement rate and return on collaborative insights.
MOG Technologies (MOG), Portugal
MOG Technologies SA (MOG) is a Portuguese company specialised in information technology development for the broadcast industry. MOG’s main activity is in the development of new technological platforms to introduce to the market products, systems and solutions, which automate the working processes of multimedia contents’ professional operators, mainly video studios, television producers, and television stations. The equipment and services introduced by MOG on the market explore facilities allowed by the new technologies, mainly MXF format, automating the content management and manipulation since its capture or generation, passing through its production and postproduction phases until playout. MOG is a Portuguese certified Cloud provider, delivering CDN and content transmissions systems to different broadcast operators.
Crowd journalism with news verification
Blockchain based crowd journalism platform.
Anonymized and democratic crowd journalist platform with a blockchain based mechanism between content creators and consumers.
We are developing a new crowd journalism platform capable of supporting massive amounts of users in a user defined breaking news location and facilitating secure transactions between the people creating the content and the ones consuming it (citizens, companies) using a blockchain based infrastructure. Users can also rate, live edit and verify content in a democratic way and therefore limiting the action of malicious actors.
A recent report from Reuters [1], the worldwide news agency, shows that 79% of major publishers are now investing more in online video news as the interest in this type of content increases dramatically in big starting news like terrorist attacks or natural disasters. As an example, the report continues by stating that during Paris terrorist attacks, “the percentage of users accessing video per visit doubled from around 10% on a normal day to 22% immediately after the attack”.
Agilia Center (AGI), Spain
Agilia Center (AGI) is a startup company specialised in complex software developments and system integrations. AGI develops complex software solutions for its clients, including Cloud migration based on automatic creation and orchestration of containers, artificial intelligence algorithms to predict markets or user behavioural patterns, as well as blockchain-based services. Using cutting-edge technologies, the services developed by AGI enable other companies to have a better understanding and management of their business, besides a complete traceability and transparency of processes using smart contracts over different blockchain implementations.
Car Sharing
Car Sharing/Riding Innovative Platform
Provide a blockchain system which support secure transactions and operations between customer and car owners and a set of machine learning algorithms for demand prediction, fleet allocation, user reputation and user reward which can engage more users and stakeholders to use the platform.
We are developing a new car sharing platform that allows customers to temporarily use a vehicle at a variable fee, charged depending on the distance travelled or time used. Also, this platform allows car owners and fleet administrators to manage their vehicles at any time of the day using a helpful tool set based on machine learning which provide demand prediction, fleet allocation, user reputation and user reward.
Gartner Forecasts More Than 740,000 Autonomous-Ready Vehicles to Be Added to Global Market in 2023 [1]
Vialog (VG), United Kingdom
Vialog Ltd is a UK based startup with a vision of searchable multi-lingual video dialogue for collaborative insights and action. Vialog is working towards lowering the threshold of async mobile video discussion participation while rewarding content-generating interactions. Vialog has delivered R&D projects co-funded by Innovate UK in multiple mobile video technology domains, including mesh video delivery and threaded video commenting. Vialog was one of the European Film Market startups in 2018 Berlinale International Film Festival, the second largest film market in the world. Vialog has graduated from Y Combinator’s 2018 class of School of Startups.
Co-creation of social impact and financial value with video opinion discussions
Blockchain-enabled embeddable video opinion discussions
Vialog leads the communication and dissemination activities of the ARTICONF consortium. Vialog also provides a use case with its micro-social networks for businesses — where video opinion creators can contribute without the need of any signup or software.
The top 3% of YouTube channels got 90% of the total views on the platform (over 1.4 million views per month), yet the average payment from YouTube amounts to less than $17,000 a year. [1] In the UK, one in three children, aged 7 to 16 said they hoped to be a full-time YouTuber when they grew up. Only a third as many said they wanted to be a doctor or nurse. [2]
To read more about the Video Opinion discussion use case, click here →
bitYoga (BY), Norway
bitYoga AS (BY) is a startup from Stavanger, Norway, aiming at providing user-centric, privacy-enabled and data-intensive products and services. It idealises research driven solutions based on cutting-edge developments in areas of blockchain, Big Data and artificial intelligence. bitYoga is focused on protecting individuals digital privacy while providing the benefits of a data economy. Through bitYoga’s revolutionary blockchain platform, you can securely share your data with anyone, and keep complete control over it. You control exactly how your data is shared in a way that works for you and your preferences.
TIC — Trust and Integration Controller
Blockchain-as-a-Service
Dynamic & Configurable Blockchain Deployment Tool.
TIC’s Blockchain-as-a-Service paradigm reduces the complexities of setting up a federated decentralized ecosystem, making its deployment simple, configurable, dynamic and easy.
IT organizations across many industries are increasingly exploring possible strategic advantages of adopting Blockchain technology. The challenges they face are inherent technical complexities, lack of domain expertise and the operational overhead costs involved in developing, operating and maintaining Blockchain technology and infrastructure. Blockchain-as-a-Service is currently considered to be a potentially viable solution to the current scarcity of key knowledge, skills and resources. [1] Real-world blockchain use cases are rapidly emerging, but the skills and resources required to build blockchain applications are neither widely available nor cheap. Therefore, Blockchain-as-a-Service possesses the potential to address this aperture and make blockchain technology accessible to a broader audience. [2]
Smart Energy Use Case
Blockchain based peer-to-peer energy trading platform
Provide a blockchain based secure peer-to-peer energy trading system, where house owners can trade energy among their neighborhoods.
In smart grids, a major challenging issue is to integrate and coordinate a large number of connections such as growing distributed energy producers, their consumers, electric vehicles, smart devices, and cyber-physical systems within the traditional centralized grid system. Managing such a continuously growing network in a centralized manner will require sophisticated and costly information and communication infrastructures.Thus, moving towards decentralization is a trend in smart grid so that all its components can incorporate and integrate in a dynamic way. Also, decentralization is one of the fundamental requirements in the EIs development happening in the smart grid according to its vision. [3]
Key Persons of ARTICONF
Prof. Radu Prodan is the Project Coordinator: ‘The Internet was always meant to be decentralised, until the Web stopped doing so: ARTICONF re-initializes trustworthy social media networks under decentralised control and ownership’
Martina Steinbacher is the Project Manager: ‘ARTICONF helps to improve online services which in turn improves user experience’
Nishant Saurabh, MSc. is the Scientific Coordinator: ‘ARTICONF provides a unified systemic umbrella to fragmented social networks with a small, yet a substantial step to support the EU’s democratic open data economy goals’
Alexandre Ulisses is the Innovation and Exploitation Coordinator: ‘Next-gen social media platforms are not just about providing services for users, instead empowering them to understand which services they really need and why’
Carlos Rubia is the Quality Manager: ‘ARTICONF serves as an enabler for startups and established companies as well as for individual users’