The project HELIOS, funded by the European Commission as part of its H2020 Programme, has launched the Beta Release of its platform by making publicly available, on a dedicated website and GitHub, different components and modules enabling key functionalities which allow 3rd party developers to build their own decentralised social media apps or other types of services based on HELIOS.

With the ambition to become a disruptive force in the European Social Media landscape and to contribute to the Next Generation Internet initiative, HELIOS is laying the foundation for a new decentralised social network vision where users take back the control of their data and content, with novel privacy and trust functionalities.

Based on multiple innovative technologies such as ad-hoc networking, cognitive interactions, peer-to-peer (P2P) communications between people and smart objects, social-graph creation, rewarding systems, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), among many others, the HELIOS Platform has been built in a modular, open-source, and extensible manner to ensure that developers can easily create social media apps or services based on HELIOS beyond the end of the project in December 2021.

The Beta Release includes some of the Core and Extension Modules that make part of the HELIOS Ecosystem and architecture. The Core components are at the heart of the system and take care of basic connectivity, security, and social networking functions developed by HELIOS, while the Extension Modules provide additional features on top of the HELIOS core components that can be used to build applications and services.

• Core Components:
  • Profile Manager: User account creation and their associated keys for signing and verification of electronic signature for encryption and decryption.
  • Personal Data Storage Manager: Data access and layer abstraction for individual personal data storage the user might use such as smartphone, cloud, etc.
  • Communication Manager: Essential messaging functionalities, the discovery of other peers and basic media functionalities.
  • Social Ego Network Manager: Storing of information about the social relations between the users. It supports the definition of contexts, as well as users and relations among them.
  • Context Manager: Overall context framework and API for the platform with context type implementations and detection for different sources and sensor APIs.
  • Security & Privacy Manager: All the user's data in the personal data storage shall be encrypted. It includes the functionalities for key and encryption manager to provide security and privacy settings.

• Extension Modules:
  • Media Streaming: In charge of the P2P streaming and media distribution functionalities with specific components for live streaming services, video call, video on demand distribution (VoD), file transfer for multimedia content, video player, and support for multiple connected users for guaranteeing the quality of experience. The module can be connected with the rewarding system between peers to enable monetization options for any type of user.
  • Graph mining: Advanced graph mining techniques on the users’ local social graph for interaction recommendation operations on HELIOS apps.
  • Rewarding: Based on the daily activity of users, the system determines the amount of HELIOS tokens for each user to gamify the experience on social media apps and reward the user for its contribution and activity to the entire community such as adding content, joining networks or checking-in on a specific location.
  • Neuro-behavioral classifier:  A set of algorithms for establishing trust relations and quality of the content generated and shared, based on the emotional response of users. Includes sentiment analysis, voice analysis, image and facial recognition.

The components and modules included in the Beta Release will be tested through different Validation Apps including a large set of features for addressing multiple integration scenarios and use cases which demonstrate the functionality of the HELIOS platform and ecosystem. The Validation Apps will become public in 2021.

Become a part of the HELIOS Developers Community!

As part of this release, the project is working on the creation of the HELIOS Developers Community aiming at involving external parties and passionate developers to test the modules and functionalities available and looking forward to strengthening the platform and its continuity beyond the funding period. In this sense, the special activities and content will be released in the upcoming months.

For more information about the project visit: www.helios-h2020.eu

For more information about the BETA Release visit: www.helios-social.com

Follow HELIOS project on Facebook and Twitter, and subscribe to the project newsletter for more interesting news.

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About HELIOS

HELIOS is an EU-funded project under the H2020 Programme with the Grant Agreement Nº 825585, working on the development of a Context-aware Distributed and Decentralised Social Network Platform introducing novel concepts for social graph creation and management, which are grounded in trust and transparency.

For further information about the project please contact the HELIOS Project Coordinator, Ville Ollikainen, VTT: ville.ollikainen@vtt.fi, and for any media enquiries please contact the HELIOS Communication Manager, Ana María Morales, Atos Spain: ana-maria.moralesperez@atos.net