Periodic Reporting for period 3 - WeNet (WeNet - The Internet of US) Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2023-06-30 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project The Internet, globalization, and the emergence of global digital platforms have transformed our lives and transcended geographical and cultural boundaries. Thanks to the web and social media, it is easy to connect to anyone in the world, who lives in a different culture, in a different social context, with different social norms, with different habits, and who speaks a different language. The amount of diversity we have access to has increased exponentially. We are exposed to a seemingly unlimited amount of diversity on a daily basis, most of which is unexpected and represents the ‘unknown unknowns’. The overall objective of WeNet is to develop a technology that enables to empower richer and deeper social interactions through diversity-aware Artificial Intelligence (AI). Diversity-awareness is the ability to cope with and capitalize on this multidimensional variability of humans, by being robust to changes across human characteristics that are not consequential for the problem at hand, while being also sensitive to the changes of those human characteristics that are so. The overall objectives of WeNet are organized along three main lines of work. The first objective focuses on how to develop an AI technology and a platform which empowers online social relationships. This is interdisciplinary work where we integrate competencies and work from many different areas. The first is the social sciences, where we have developed a sociological model of diversity built around the notion of communities of practice. The second is AI, where we are developing a set of algorithms that allow the AI to learn the profile of the user, with specific reference to her situational and social context. The third is ethics as an underlying methodology and concrete approach providing requirements in the development of WeNet. The second objective is focused on an intense piloting activity. The main idea is that technological innovation should be motivated and validated by a clear and positive societal innovation. We have therefore developed a highly innovative diversity-aware pilot design research, and we are running pilots in Europe, India, China, Mongolia, Paraguay, and Mexico. These pilots have involved thousands of students in synchronic studies (performed via online questionnaires) and hundreds of students in diachronic studies, collecting both user responses and sensor data (via a dedicated app developed as part of the project). The third is the bootstrap of a community around the WeNet idea, involving users, developers and innovators, and scientists. The main tools for this are the WeNet platform, which is open-source and available to third parties, and a research infrastructure whose main goal is to make the data collected available to third parties. The bootstrap of the WeNet idea is further pushed by a set of accompanying measures including an intensive dissemination activity, several online meetings, and webinars, a set of online courses, an open call for third parties, and, at the end of the project, a two-day event whose main goal will be to bootstrap the post-project development of the WeNet.During the first phase, which lasted about twelve months, the work focused on developing the building blocks of the three lines of work mentioned above. A lot of emphasis was placed on planning and organizing the pilot activities and ensuring that the pilots would comply with the data protection (GDPR) and ethics requirements, also taking into account that some of them would have to be carried outside the European Union. In a second phase, approximately lasting another twelve months, a first version of the technology and the WeNet platform was produced, deployed and used in the first round of pilots. In the current, third phase, i.e. the last twenty-four months, the data collected during the pilots have been prepared and processed, including a complex and intensive anonymisation phase, and made available to the partners. This data is now being analyzed and studied with the main goal of designing the second and third rounds of pilots, which were executed within the third phase. The ultimate goal is to have a deeper understanding of how diversity appears in the pilot regions and countries, and the implications of this for the WeNet technology and platform. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far In the Research work in Social Sciences and Ethics, we have developed an ethics and privacy sociological model of Diversity, based on the notion of a community of practice.In AI research and technology work we have developed the WeNet Platform and an APP enabling social relations among University students,who may not know each other. Furthermore, we have developed a Research Infrastructure that provides services to enable diversity-aware data collection, including GDPR-compliant data processing and data sharing.The project has involved 20.000+ students in 5 different pilots. This activity was organized around two main lines of work. The first was a set of experiments aimed at collecting data needed to build sociological models of diversity. These experiments were carried out in Italy, Denmark, the UK, Mongolia, India, China, Paraguay and Mexico. The second was a set of pilot studies, aimed at testing and evaluating the WeNet platform and the app developed on top of it. These experiments were run in Italy, Denmark, UK, Mongolia, and Paraguay.The work on Community development work evolved along various dimensions, including (a) A first version of the WeNet platform available as open-source; (b) a first version of the research infrastructure supporting the basic services enabling the pilots, namely: dataset preparation, upload, dataset search, and download; (c) an online course, as the main tool for disseminating the WeNet ideas, and also in support of the work done by the winners of the open calls; and (d) the preparation and announcement of the open calls, with the goal to make the WeNet platform and the Research Infrastructure available to third parties. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) WeNet is well underway in achieving all its objectives. All the technology developed is well beyond the state of the art, as testified by the number of top-level publications published by the consortium.Besides the single research and technology results, we see two major results which are very innovative and out of the mainstream research. The first is the development of a social theory of diversity, started and still underway. The second is our extensive use of ethics and ethical principles as providing functional and non-functional guidelines for the design of the WeNet platform and, therefore, of the future online social relations.As to the socio-economic impact, Covid has accelerated the process of progressive virtualization of social relations and has made the WeNet vision even more compelling, thus increasing the probability of its impact and adoption in the forthcoming new wave of technology. The European new guidelines for a safer and more Human-centric AI are also fully aligned with the WeNet vision. In this respect, the Research Infrastructure has the potential of becoming an important enabler of the next generation of human-aware research in AI. Finally, and most importantly, the technology developed in AI has a high impact potential and various possibilities are being considered for bringing this technology to the market. Pilot Poster (ENG) WeNet Flyer 2 - Page 2 Manifesto - Page 1 WeNet Flyer 2 - Page 3 Manifesto - Page 2 WeNet Roll Up Pilot Poster (MN) WeNet Poster WeNet Flyer 2 - Page 4 WeNet Flyer 2 - Page 1
