smART socIal media eCOsytstem in a blockchaiN Federated environment

Project Information

ARTICONF

Grant agreement ID: 825134

DOI

10.3030/825134

Project closed

EC signature date 21 November 2018

Start date 1 January 2019

End date 30 June 2022

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 4 166 877,50

EU contribution

€ 4 166 877,50

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAET KLAGENFURT
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ARTICONF (smART socIal media eCOsytstem in a blockchaiN Federated environment)

Reporting period: 2020-01-01 to 2022-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The last decade saw an exponential increase in people’s online engagement regardless of age, gender, or nationalities through popular social media platforms, eventually creating a “Social Continuum”. Unfortunately, popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, or TikTok are monolithic platforms hosted on centralised Cloud data centres and controlled by a single company. This central ownership model raises trust issues and increases concern for data security, privacy, transparency, and false content propagation. Typical examples are fake identities engaging in controversial discussions or deliberately communicating low-quality manipulative information that spreads quicker and attracts more audiences than credible sources.

To mitigate such challenges, Decentralised Social Applications (Social DApps), based on blockchain technology and hosted on a federated Cloud, present good potential to create a secure and practically inviolable Social Continuum, connecting billions of people under no centralised control and allowing them to share information using democratic consensus protocols safely. The ARTICONF project researches and develops a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform for building trustworthy, scalable and democratic Social DApps on top of a decentralised, federated Cloud infrastructure through four Social DApp use cases: crowd journalism, carsharing, video opinion discussion and energy marketplace.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ARTCONF researches and develops BaaS consisting of four open-source tools that support the development of trustworthy, secure and scalable Social DApps. Although a small number of platforms (e.g. Steem, AKasha) addressing similar goals exist, ARTICONF is the first European open-source initiative that builds its solution on a Cloud-agnostic BaaS federated infrastructure.

Trust and Integration Controller (TIC) is a Cloud-agnostic BaaS deployed on a federated Cloud infrastructure, currently connected to OpenStack, AWS and Google Cloud. TIC facilitates transparent, secure, reliable and interoperable Social DApp development on a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain service with high transaction validation throughput. TIC uses Docker Swarm to orchestrate blockchain services, such as smart contract deployment and network performance management. A persistent Cloud storage enables automatic BaaS restart and recovery upon infrastructure failures.

Co-located and Orchestrated Network Fabric (CONF) provides a suite of microservices for planning, provisioning, monitoring, and adapting a customised federated Cloud infrastructure to time-critical Social DApps. CONF uses the TOSCA standard to map Social DApps performance requirements onto federated Cloud infrastructure topology. Further, it deploys DApps by selecting the appropriate Cloud site and the virtual machine that satisfies their time and quality-critical constraints (e.g. deadline, security, distribution, latency). Further, it ensures fast recovery in the presence of faults or performance drops through rapid deployment or migration of Social DApp resources closer to the bottleneck areas.

Semantic Model with self‐adaptive Autonomous Relevant Technology (SMART) is a personalised knowledge-as-a-service tool that augments the DApp network for collaborative and participatory decision-making. It collects semi-structured transaction data from the blockchain, splits them into unique contexts (e.g. location, timestamp), and semantically links through diverse contexts. Afterwards, SMART clusters transactions with similar properties (e.g. locations, times, prices, values) for each context and temporally partitions the cluster groups into stages containing transactions within specific time intervals. The temporally partitioned steps allow discovery of the clusters’ evolution (e.g. growth, shrink) to understand the changing behavioural patterns of Social DApps.

Tools for Analytics and Cognition (TAC) is a guided analytics tool that uses cognitive techniques to enhance engagement between DApp providers and users. TAC provides a suite of microservices based on the Elasticsearch and Kibana stack for Cloud-based data analytics, including data indexing, search, filtering, aggregation, and visual reporting. Initially, TAC uses Logstash to preprocess the aggregated data, apply transformations, and push it to the ElasticSearch tool to process data schemas. ElasticSearch uses document-oriented indexing to associate the parsed data schema with the search entries supplied by the DApp provider. Finally, TAC uses KIbana for Web service-based visual exploration of the analysed data.

The outcome of the ARTICONF project is a BaaS toolset for Social DApp development released on GitHub as a set of four integrated tools under the Apache 2 License at: https://articonf.eu/results/. The consortium disseminated the project results in over 70 international publications and over 150 events. Finally, it established the ARTICONF foundation to exploit the BaaS toolset after the project completion.

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)

The Crowd Journalism DApp allows fast ad-hoc Cloud deployment of a Social DApp by citizens near an unexpected or isolated event, allowing its coverage before professional journalists and media companies arrive. ARTICONF BaaS platform ensures the privacy and anonymity of citizens and journalists and prohibits censorship or fake news propagation. ARTICONF tested and validated the Citizen Journalism DApp at various live events, including the Jungfrau-Marathon 2021 in Switzerland, one of the most demanding marathons in the world, gathering and engaging hundreds of journalists and users. Around 200 participants streamed the event from their mobile phones to the ARTICONF BaaS platform generating over six hours of coverage and over 500 views on a designated YouTube channel.

The Video-Opinion Discussion Social DApp generated over three thousand social video opinions over twelve communities on politically essential topics such as Hungarian academic freedom, education and knowledge exchange, equality, diversity and inclusions, digital divide, climate, employability, and political elections. The ARTICONF tools produced over 16 thousand moderation events to support these discussions. Vialog is a Net Zero emissions company that recently launched the “one thread, one tree program” to plant one tree for each new discussion thread.

The Carsharing Social DApp called Trango (“trip and go”) launched a market testing campaign with the European EGI-ACE and ReachOut projects gathering feedback from over 500 users, resulting in five new functionalities. According to our simulations, fleet management optimised through decentralised peer-to-peer business transactions and secure data sharing increases trust, decreases the cost of payments and escrow for shared cars and improves sustainability by producing up to 38% less CO2 emissions.

The Energy Marketplace DApp provides a trusted, transparent and decentralised control over the propagated energy data among the energy regulators, prosumers, consumers and grid operators. It allows utility companies to incentivise customers to log their consumption and production data. They define smart contracts that provide rewards and loyalty points to their customers for sharing data and determine prices for repurchasing energy from their customers. Customers can choose to sell their excess energy to the grid or their peers and claim rewards for paying their energy bills.

ARTICONF toolset for decentralised application development