Impacts

As a part of our dissemination and exploitation activities, we had the goal to disseminate the PICOS results and achievements in research and practice and to exploit the results in a practical context. With a research project like PICOS it is never easy to measure the impact of such (often long-term oriented) means. Nevertheless, there are indicators that allow deriving conclusions about the impact of our research.

• Dissemination and public feedback

Considering the dissemination itself, and its impact, there are a few of indicators. For example, the number of visitors on the PICOS website significantly increased with the presence at the Mobile World Congress. Also in the time afterwards, between fall 2010 and spring 2011, the visitors numbers increased. The presence of PICOS on Twitter and Facebook was surely an attempt to address more closely the end users.
In addition, a number of the events at which we were selected or invited to represent PICOS were also only possible due to previous interesting and successful presentations. As examples the ServiceWave 2010 (selected as one of 24 research projects), the Effectsplus Cluster Meeting and an exchange meeting between European and Canadian researchers can be mentioned here (see section 4.2). This counts not least also for the PICOS summit event held at the IFIP SEC 2011 conference in Lucerne (Switzerland).  

• Technical exploitation

PICOS concepts provide the basis for the enhancement of products and services in practice. Products such as the Privacy Gateway can be mentioned here as well as mobile communications solution as provided by Atos and HP. The portability of PICOS concepts to the Android and WebOS operating systems indicate further opportunities for future services and features. Not least, besides the actual privacy concepts we provided a foundation for future business models, based on an advanced advertising approach, which considers the characteristics of social communities as well as privacy related aspects.

• Transfer to communities in practice

The PICOS work is about to have multiple impacts in practice. This includes the developed mobile client application based on the Android operating system, named PICOSlight, an application, which is intended to be used by end-users. Thereby PICOS concepts are directly integrated in an end-user application, which can provide an important basis for a broader application of such concepts in social communities. Further impacts are assumed from the integration of PICOS concepts in commercial products related to communities, e.g. by ATOS, HP, ITO and Deutsche Telekom AG (see D9.2.3 “Exploitation Plan 3” for full details). These are notable indicators for a further and sustainable impact of our concepts and achievements in practice in the future.

• Engagement in standardisation

In the area of industry standardisation PICOS continuously contributed to the drafts of the ‘Privacy reference architecture’ and the draft of the ‘Privacy Framework’. Based on this ongoing effort, we aim to influence industrial standards for privacy enhanced social communities and related services. One of the remarkable impacts on this so far is especially the inclusion of the exemplary privacy reference architecture based on the PICOS architecture in the draft.