HELIOS Kick-off meeting

Last week took place the kick-off meeting of HELIOS, a new project funded by EC in which a social media network will be developed and will address the dynamic nature of human communications in three dimensions- contextual, spatial and temporal.

HELIOS will develop a decentralized social media platform that will address the dynamic nature of human communications in three dimensions: contextual, spatial and temporal. HELIOS adds easy-to-apply social media functionality to mobile applications, on Android to begin with, reducing development cost and deployment complexity. Once the HELIOS core is installed on any user device, developed apps can utilize user’s social networks in each context, with deepening and decaying relations, passing messages through the network on a trust basis, collecting automatic feedback from message recipients, analysing feedback data and providing analysis results with attestation. This data can be further utilized, for instance for propagating trust, discrediting suspicious pieces of content, demonstrating commercial value of content, or just to know how friends reacted, the project introducing an online substitute for body language. HELIOS will substantially advance the current approach to social media by introducing novel concepts for social graph creation and management, which are grounded in trust and transparency and will enrich the value of the user's social networks. Furthermore, HELIOS will be built in a modular and extensible manner, by enabling all features characterizing social media today and growing beyond. This ensures that social media designers can now and in the future create novel social media apps on top of HELIOS, easily. The underlying technical paradigms reflect the European value system of decentralisation and cultural diversity under a common framework of understanding. Among others, these are concepts such as decentralisation, context detection in IoT environment, real and virtual object networking, peer-to-peer based content streaming and validation. Moreover, to ensure wider impact on civil society, diverse use-cases will be developed and tested.
The scientific and pragmatic insights gained through HELIOS will advance the state of the art in several areas of innovation such as, social graph creation and management, neuro-feedback, content engagement, privacy, ethics, decentralisation etc. All in all, with the ambition to become a disruptive force in the European social media landscape, HELIOS aspires to lay the foundation for a new social network vision grounded on transparency and verification.

The Consortium includes:
* Large Industrial Partners: ATOS, WLI
· SMEs: GAR, NG and STXT
· Research Institutes: VTT, CERTH, ISMB, MASS, UPV
· Universities: TCD, UAB, UNIPI, UP, UPV and UH