24 Nov UIST will host the H2020 ARTICONF consortium meeting in Ohrid
Today’s most popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., are centralised platforms owned by private corporations that unilaterally control the respective networks. Horizon 2020 project “smART socIal media eCOsystem in a blockchaiN Federated environment (ARTICONF)” is devoted to researching and developing a series of trustworthy, resilient and globally sustainable decentralised social networks platforms. Today, social media platforms are key technologies that connect people to global networks. They can create new forms of communication and bring about significant changes in mobilisation, business practices, the learning process, and knowledge acquisition. Market companies currently carry significant social responsibility. They are not affected in many respects, including trust and concern for social media user data privacy.
Essentially, ARTICONF aims to create a decentralised and federated social media ecosystem, supported by an underlying blockchain technology seamlessly coupled with optimised trust-based measures in an anonymised environment, which simplifies traceability to identify bad actors and eliminates malicious contents such as fake news. Moreover, its novel socio-cognitive and smart matching practices integrate relevant users with common interests into an orchestrated networked community world without de-anonymising them. Supposedly, such a design would bring a range of social media actors (individuals, start-ups, SMEs) under one systemic umbrella and allow them to be a part of incentivised collaborative decision-making and sharing economy. In principle, ARTICONF presents a new perspective in the current age when data breaches and undemocratic practices are a regular phenomenon at the hands of centralised intermediaries by creating an open and transparent ecosystem, where control lies in the hands of each anonymous user with provisions for individual or collaborative monetised enhancement.
The University of Information Science and Technology “St. Paul the Apostle” will host the ARTICONF consortium meeting held from 13 to 16 December 2021 in Ohrid. The University is the carrier of the scientific research work for dynamic analytics and knowledge of the data obtained from the participants’ cooperation in the smart ecosystems from social media. The main objective of UIST is the monetisation of online services through collaborative cooperation with decentralised social networks. Significant scientific and research achievements of the UIST in the project:
- Implemented Tools for Analytics and Cognition (TAC) architecture;
- Implementation of TAC geospatial, temporal and visualisation microservices;
- Introduced the Return On Investment (ROI) monitoring social concept;
- Prototyped initial Return On Collaboration (ROC) metrics microservice;
- ARTICONF user interface with integrated monitoring tool-set.
This three-year project (2019-2022), endowed with a budget of approx. 4.2 million Euros brings together eight participating institutions from Austria, the Netherlands, Great Britain, North Macedonia, Portugal, Spain, and Norway. More information on the institutions involved in the project’s development and the scientific research achievements is available on the project website https://articonf.eu/.