The demand for new media content where videos are augmented with computer generated graphics grows rapidly driven by the enormous amount of online videos and the advent of new eye-wear and mobile devices. In a typical video content production workflow, expensive human resources are allocated for the creation of high quality and realism videos. The high cost of content production remains mostly with SMEs representing 85% of the creative industry sector. The use of automatic video analysis can significantly optimize the existing production workflows and cut the cost. Yet the video analytics market dominated by SMEs is highly fragmented too: Video analytics is only available at high prices and locked to vendors. This limits the interoperability and results into overall market inefficiency. This proposal offers the solution to this problem by bringing the developers of video analytics and their users from the content creating industry together on a shared video analytics WEB repository with innovative services for selecting, testing and soliciting all kinds of video analytics solutions. The repository allows the users to choose the solution with the utmost transparency: The user can directly test all available solutions in the repository with own videos. If the content creator cannot find a suitable video analytics from the wide range available, he can solicit a newly developed video analytics solution, which is tailor-made to his requirements. The objectives of this proposal are i) establish the WEB repository; ii) define core video analytics applications relevant for content creators; iii) collect a large number of relevant video analytics applications in the WEB repository; iv) customise WEB repository services to the needs of content creators; v) demonstrate added value of the repository in eight use cases implemented by the project creative SMEs; vi) develop business model for the repository commercial operation beyond the project duration.

Delivering on the 5G promise of increased data rates, and ubiquitous coverages, poses stringent requirements on traditional vertically integrated operators. In particular, telecom operators are expected to massively roll out Small Cells, which requires finding appropriate urban spaces with both backhaul and energy availability. Network sharing becomes essential to unlock those commercial massive deployments. The open access model, or neutral host, will come to play a key role on the deployment of 5G networks, especially in urban scenarios where very dense Small Cell deploymens are required. In parallel recent trends are paving the way towards the development of new, heterogeneous and distributed cloud paradigms that significantly differ from today’s established cloud model: with edge computing, cloud architectures are pushed all the way to the edge of the network, close to the devices that produce and act on data. We posit that there are two sets of players perfectly poised to take advantage of both trends since they already own the infrastructure needed to build edge deployments: telecommunication providers and municipalities. 5GCity focuses on how common smart city infrastructure (i.e.,small cells and processing power at the very edge of networks) can bring benefit to both players based on resource sharing and end-to-end virtualization, pushing the cloud model to the extreme edge. 5GCity will design, develop, deploy and demonstrate a distributed cloud and radio platform for municipalities and infrastructure owners acting as 5G neutral hosts. 5GCity’s main aim is to build and deploy a common, multi-tenant, open platform that extends the (centralized) cloud model to the extreme edge of the network, with a demonstration in three different cities (Barcelona, Bristol and Lucca). 5GCity will directly impact a large and varied range of actors: (i) telecom providers; (ii) municipalities; and (iii) a number of different vertical sectors utilizing the city infrastructure

DataCloud provides a novel paradigm covering the complete lifecycle of managing Big Data pipelines through discovery, design, simulation, provisioning, deployment, and adaptation across the Computing Continuum. Big Data pipelines in DataCloud interconnect the end-to-end industrial operations of collecting pre-processing and filtering data, transforming and delivering insights, training simulation models, and applying them in the cloud to achieve a business goal. DataCloud delivers a toolbox of new languages, methods, infrastructures, and prototypes for discovering, simulating, deploying, and adapting Big Data pipelines on heterogeneous and untrusted resources. DataCloud separates the design from the run-time aspects of Big Data pipeline deployment, empowering domain experts to take an active part in their definitions. The main exploitation targets the operation and monetization of the toolbox in European markets, and in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America. Its aim is to lower the technological entry barriers for the incorporation of Big Data pipelines in organizations’ business processes and make them accessible to a wider set of stakeholders regardless of the hardware infrastructure. DataCloud validates its plan through a strong selection of complementary business cases offered by SMEs and a large company targeting higher mobile business revenues in smart marketing campaigns, reduced production costs of sport events, trustworthy eHealth patient data management, and reduced time to production and better analytics in Industry 4.0 manufacturing. The balanced consortium consists of 11 partners from eight countries. It has three strong university partners specialised in Big Data, distributed computing, and high-productivity languages, led by a research institute. DataCloud gathers six SMEs and one large company (as technology providers and stakeholders/users/early adopters) that prioritise the business focus of the project in achieving high business impacts.

The SWITCH project (Software Workbench for Interactive, Time Critical and Highly self-adaptive Cloud applications) addresses the urgent industrial need for developing and executing time critical applications in Clouds. Time critical applications such as disaster early warning, collaborative communication and live event broadcasting can only realise their expected business value when they meet critical requirements for performance and user experience. The very high requirements on network and computing services, particularly for well-tuned software architecture with sophisticated data communication optimisation, mean that development of such time critical applications is often customised to dedicated infrastructure, and system performance is difficult to maintain when infrastructure changes. This fatal weakness in the existing architecture and software tools yields very high development cost, and makes it difficult fully to utilize the virtualised, programmable services provided by networked Clouds to improve system productivity. SWITCH aims at improving the existing development and execution model of time critical applications by introducing a novel conceptual model (application-infrastructure co-programming and control model), in which application QoS/QoE, together with the programmability and controllability of the Cloud environments, can all be included in the complete lifecycle of applications. Based on this conceptual model, SWITCH provides an interactive environment for developing applications and controlling their execution, a real-time infrastructure planner for deploying applications in Clouds, and an autonomous system adaptation platform for monitoring and adapting system behaviour. The SWITCH consortium has well-balanced partners with complementary expertise from both academic and industrial backgrounds. By demonstrating the software using diverse use cases, the consortium specifically aims at exploitation of the business potential of the SWITCH results.

Social media platforms are key technologies for next generation connectivity. Social media platforms have the potential to shape and mobilise patterns of communication, practices of exchange and business, creation, learning and knowledge acquisition. Typically, social media are centralised platforms with a single proprietary organisation controlling the network. This poses critical issues of trust and governance over created and propagated content. This is particularly problematic when data breaches are a regular phenomenon at the hands of centralised intermediaries. To address this, we need innovative solutions at the user level (i.e. that of consumers, prosumers, and businesses) and at the level of the underlying social media environment. This will facilitate global reach, improved trust, and decentralised control and ownership. ARTICONF researches and develops a novel set of trustworthy, resilient, and globally sustainable decentralised social media services. ARTICONF addresses issues of trust, time-criticality and democratisation for a new generation of federated infrastructure, to fulfil the privacy, robustness, and autonomy related promises that proprietary social media platforms have failed to deliver so far. Namely, its goals are to: (1) simplify the creation of open and agile social media ecosystem with trusted participation using a two stage permissioned blockchain; (2) automatically detect interest groups and communities using graph anonymization techniques for decentralised and tokenized decision-making and reasoning; (3) elastically autoscale time-critical social media applications through an adaptive orchestrated Cloud edge-based infrastructure meeting application runtime requirements; and (4) enhance monetary inclusion in collaborative models through cognition and knowledge supply chains.