The HELIOS project will design, implement and validate a state-of-the-art, peer-to-peer federated social media network that addresses the dynamic nature of human communications in three dimensions- contextual, spatial and temporal- while providing all necessary means to ensure the highest level of trust and privacy. HELIOS implements a user-friendly solution for creating and managing social networks. Its core scope is to facilitate democratization of content production, promotion and monetization. HELIOS will also reduce development cost and deployment complexity of any social media application built on top of it. Implemented technologies and tools are following a modular strategy which ensures continuous development beyond the scope of the project, yet maintaining basic features of security and robustness. As a unique value proposition, the project will overcome the closed ecosystem stigma and will re-define the term “social media platform” by creating a foundation for co-operating social networking services. The novel distributed context-layered model in which different types of services (private and public) can form symbiotic existence.

The cost of software failures is a huge burden to the worldwide economy that was estimated to be at least £1.3 trillion in 2017. Consequently, software testing, a vital defence against failures, contributes to a large proportion of software development effort and cost. Flaky tests are a particular strain on resources allocated to software development, because they intermittently pass and fail without changes to tests or project code, with often maddening, non-obvious causes. Flaky tests are tests that fundamentally do not always tell the truth: they can fail when code is working, and pass when it isn't. Because developers can no longer trust the results of their tests, they are unable to gain confidence that software is working correctly, potentially exposing end-users to the consequences of software failures. Flaky tests are a common occurrence in industry, significantly disrupting software development - even for companies with the greatest amount of resources to tackle them, such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. A test can produce different pass/fail (i.e., flaky) outcomes because of differing, unpredicted ways that the execution environment in which it runs interacts with its behaviour and/or the code that it tests. For instance, a machine may be experiencing a heavy concurrent task load, causing it to execute tests slowly, sometimes triggering timeouts in the code under test, and sometimes not. Or, network access is erratic on the testing infrastructure, meaning the availability of network resources may be compromised. Or, a program under test's logic is time and date dependent. These are just a few real examples of the different ways in which tests can be flaky. For some environmental conditions, the test passes, but in an alternative context, the same test fails. To remove flaky test behaviour, a developer has to modify test code or the code that it tests to control for aspects of its execution environment; i.e., the potential sources of its intermittent behaviour. But to accurately assess the differences in code execution behaviour and the places in the code that need to be changed, a developer must be able to reliably reproduce the differing pass/fail test outcomes. However, this not only involves recreating the environmental conditions that lead to the flaky behaviour, but also figuring out exactly what the environmental conditions were that caused the flakiness in the first place. Solving these issues and reproducing flaky tests manually can be extremely challenging for developers since the environmental conditions concerned (a) are intermittent; and (b) may be unrelated to anything the test is actually checking, and/or far-removed from the code being tested. Existing research techniques are insufficient for addressing these problems, and despite developer incentives for removing flakiness, Google, for instance, reports an astonishing one in seven tests as flaky. What the Test FLARE Project Will Do: The Test FLARE project will develop and empirically evaluate techniques capable of (1) automatically reproducing flaky behaviour that is due to the execution environment. It will also provide developers with (2) automated, human-readable explanations that help developers further understand the reasons for the flaky behaviour.

Over the past decade, Russia’s ruling elites have massively stepped up their efforts to influ-ence media audiences abroad. Amongst others, Russia has been alleged to have sought to sway votes in Austria, France, Germany, Ukraine, and the US. This project’s overarching research ques-tion is: How, and with what consequences, have new Internet-based technologies contributed to the emergence of novel resources, techniques, and processes by which political elites in Moscow can influence media audiences abroad? In order to address this question, a theoretical work package (WP4) will undertake the first major systematic effort to interrogate how much, or how little, we can leverage extant in-depth knowledge of former-Soviet foreign propaganda, conducted in the broadcast era, in order to make sense of Russia’s recent digitally-enabled efforts. WP4 will be informed by three empirical WPs. They will scrutinize three heavily digitally-enabled elements of Russia’s recent efforts: • WP1 will conduct a comprehensive in-depth study of foreign active online audiences and other co-creators of Russia-related content. • WP2 will produce pioneering research about how social media platforms function as key transmission channels that connect Russia’s domestic media with Russian-speaking audiences abroad. • WP3 will be the first study to scrutinize the role of the Kremlin-controlled search engine Yan-dex as a resource of foreign influence. Methodologically, WP1-3 are highly innovative because they combine new computational methods (data mining, automated text analysis) with traditional methods (surveys, in-depth inter-views, grounded theory). In response to Russia’s recent efforts, countermeasures have been ushered in by a plurality of actors, including the EU, NATO, and NGOs. These actors will benefit immensely from the knowledge generated, which will enable them to enhance their initiatives to secure democratic elec-toral processes against undue informational interference.