UCN: User-Centric Networking

February 18th, 2015

This project introduces the concept of User Centric Networking (UCN), which is a new paradigm leveraging user information at large to deliver novel content recommendation systems and content delivery frameworks.UCN recommendation and content delivery systems will leverage in-depth knowledge about users to help them find relevant content, identify nearby network resources and plan how to deliver the actual content to the appropriate device at the desired time. These systems will additionally account for influences from users’ social networks on their content consumption. The goal of this project is to design a UCN system architecture for user-centricconnected media services. We will build UCN upon three complementary research pillars:

1.- understanding user context
This data can be broadly categorized into three groups. First, the physical and environmental context A second category of data is that which can be extracted from social network interactions. The third category of data is behavioural

2.- profiling and predicting user interests
By gaining a deep understanding of the user, we may be able to cast a much wider net in the content ocean and locate a richer catalogue of interesting content for the user

3.-personalizing content delivery
Rather than the user (or the service provider) having to worry about the mode of connectivity, device, service, location, etc., the network intelligently directs and adapts the transport stream, or perhaps pre-fetches and replicates content chunks, to the particular and immediate needs of the user.

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Expected Impact

UCN will deliver solutions that contribute to the well-being of the European citizens through ubiquitous access to content. UCN technologies and solutions for privacy preserving data collection and exchange protect the privacy of the users and households and at the same time reduce the risk of leakage of end users’ highly sensitive personal information.
More specifically, UCN will impact the following areas:

  • Design a personalized digital media delivery and content discovery platform that inherently preserves privacy.
  • Development of privacy preserving data exchange technologies enabling the protected use of highly sensitive profile data from end users.
  • Development of novel and innovative content recommendation mechanisms using rich end user profiles.
  • Aggregating and bridging the wide variety of technologies underlying the end-user’s services and digital content in the home network and the Internet.
  • New services and applications in other sectors that similarly can benefit from leverage richer user contextual information, such as home automation, tele-health/care, and security.

 
UCN will help to rebuild the trust in the use of personal information by the network service providers. The monitoring tools and the ability to control the amount of private data exposed to 3rd parties, will put the end user back into control of its publicly available profile data.

Consortium

 

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