STEER

Project Objectives

In the STEER (Social Telemedia Environment for Experimental Research) project we were addressing this community-centric digitally-based ecosystem, which we refer to as 'Social Telemedia', a cross-breeding of social networks and networked media. Social Telemedia further intensifies societal practices and habits as they flourish on a new network middleware framework that will combine Social Informatics and Content Delivery. Social Informatics loosely refer to any digitized information that is generated or exchanged in the context of social networking whereas content delivery represents the communication medium through which social informatics are exchanged, only this time content could be delivered through a bundle of synchronised and heterogeneous flows to a community of users.

The overall objective of the project was to make significant advances in Social Telemedia research and practices, and engineer an operational Social Telemedia environment customized to support various innovative experiments. These experiments were oriented toward investigating the intrinsic nature of the Future Social Telemedia Lifecycle revolving around communities, revealing new properties and patterns, creating new insights, and, exploring the synergy between Social Informatics and Networked Media delivery and its impact on user experience.

To achieve this objective, STEER contributed new experimental facilities such as smart houses and mobile devices, developing a Social-Aware Media Enabled Cloud architecture, and integrated with the OpenLab and EXPERIMEDIA project facilities.