In this talk, we will explore the evolution of streaming services developed and operated in-house by GRNET NOC, as influenced by the development of high quality open-source software and GRNET's cloud computing infrastructure. The technical discussion will be accompanied by observations on the increasing user demand for such services in recent years, using the Hellenic Parliament Web TV as a case study. The presentation will showcase how such a flexible and scalable infrastructure has allowed our team to cope with record-breaking bursts of user demand, and how the continuous evolution of this infrastructure towards high quality and cost effective services can scale to meet the expectations of users.

Social networks have emerged as a dominant form of social interaction, but they continue to exhibit poor support for synchronous forms of communication. Recently we have also witnessed a rapid increase in the use of video conferencing for socialisation, evidence of the fact that body language and voice intonations are an essential part of our everyday interactions, in many instances more important than the words themselves. The two forms of communication, however, remain more or less separated from each other. The EU FP7 project Vconect hypothesizes that integrating them can create a richer form of mediated social interaction. This integration poses significant challenges with regards to service design as well as to platform implementation, the latter requiring the ability of a live video communication system to dynamically adapt to both communication contexts and network constraints thereby maximising interaction experiences and minimising the cost of operation. This presentation will report on positive results achieved by Vconect in addressing these challenges. Presented by Mr. Michael Frantzis, Goldsmiths University of London

This talk will present the work of the SocialSensor project, towards developing a new framework for enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search in the Social Web. Being in its final year SocialSensor has developed a platform with real-time social indexing capabilities prototyped in two use cases: (a) news, involving professional news editors, journalists and casual readers, for discovering new interesting social content, and (b) infotainment, providing new multimedia search tools and unique media consumption experiences to attendants of large events (e.g. festivals). Presented by Dr Nikos Sarris, Head of Operations, ATC Innovation Lab

Linked Open Data has come to prominence recently as it has been taken up by a number of governments and big Internet and Media players such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and the BBC to link online resources and data. Within this talk I outline how Linked Open Data could be used as a glue between social networks and network media using a number of Open University projects that are based on this technology. Specifically, we have been using Linked Open Data to analyse social networks, support 'live social semantics' where we combine online information and Linked Data to support real interactions at a conference, support video discovery, support the discovery of learning,resources from semantic markup of BBC broadcast programmes, and support end-user advertising of products shown within online videos.