Organisation Profile
Founded in 1987, ATC is an Information Technology company offering solutions and services in specific business sectors, including media, banking, utilities and the public sector. Solutions include content management systems, enterprise software, services for the web, and mobile applications.
The development of products and services for the media market is one of the primary commercial activities of ATC. The company succeeded to win contracts and sell its services in several EU countries, Eastern Europe and the CIS countries, as well as the Balkans. NewsAsset, an end-to-end multimedia cross-channel solution for news agencies, broadcasters and publishers, is the leading edge solution of the company’s success story, offering commercial contracts both inside and outside Greece. Indicative major clients are the national news agencies of Greece, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Cyprus and Tunisia, along with many publishers in several EU countries.
The ATC Innovation Lab (http://ilab.atc.gr/) shows more than 25 years of expertise in research and innovation. Its objective is to turn promising ideas into concrete and robust products for the sectors of commercial interest to ATC. Through intense and continuous involvement in cutting-edge research and innovation projects, the ATC Innovation Lab develops the next generation of commercial targets, exploiting state-of-the-art technologies. Being a technology partner, iLab has developed skills in modern software engineering techniques, like agile prototyping, DevOps and Model Driven Engineering, while its team members have successfully applied tools and methodologies for continuous integration, such as Maven, Hudson, Sonar and Junit, in the integration of medium and large scale innovation projects.
Particularly in recent years, ATC have acknowledged that misinformation is a major issue (for the media industry and society as a whole). This led to focussing large part of the Lab’s work into providing tools which can alleviate this. Since 2011, in the framework of the EC-funded project SocialSensor, ATC identified the need to assess the trustworthiness of information found in Social Media and built the first service for these purposes, branded as Alethiometer. After this, within the EC-funded project REVEAL, misinformation was targeted exclusively. Out of this work evolved TruthNest (after a rebranding exercise), a social media analysis tool / suite. TruthNest was selected as one of the top 20 innovations to reach the Innovation Radar finals in the 2017 ICT Proposers Day in Budapest. It ultimately won the public award.
In continuation to this effort the team of ATC iLab worked with Deutsche Welle and extended TruthNest with a collaborative environment (TrulyMedia) for the same purposes, receiving funding from the Google Digital News Initiative for development. The collaborative verification platform TrulyMedia is now used by newsrooms and human rights organisations for fact-checking purposes, also being highly appraised by the likes of dpa (the German Press Agency) and BR (Bayrischer Rundfunk) who used TrulyMedia for collaborative fact-checking and verification during the German elections.
In November 2017, Truly Media was the only case study presented in the European Parliament Panel for Scientific and Technological Option Assessment. During that presentation, it was also announced that Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps would start using Truly Media from January 2018 onwards in its everyday operations to verify information related to human rights violations.
Also worth mentioning: ATC is a partner in the NESSI ETP (www.nessi-europe.com) and a founding member in the Big Data Value Association (www.bdva.eu).
Role in the Project:
ATC will act as the Exploitation Manager and lead the respective work package (WP 8) of the project, including the respective task for Innovation and Exploitation planning (T8.4). This includes focusing considerably on sustainability and exploitation of the WeVerify results, ensuring that IPR related strategies are in place, the market is continuously monitored, and business planning and modelling takes place.
Furthermore, ATC will be instrumental in delivering the professional platform for verification services by improving TrulyMedia, which is already one of the leading solutions in the area, connecting it with tools that will be developed in WeVerify. While many of those WeVerify tools and services will also be offered as open source, TrulyMedia will be the premium professional environment, which will eventually become the commercial offering and main exploitable outcome of WeVerify.
Alongside what has been outlined above, ATC will guide all the tool development work and use cases with their strong business experience of over twenty years in the media sector. Especially its experience in marketing commercial services (such as NewsAsset) as well as bringing results of EC funded R&D projects into the market (such as TruthNest and TrulyMedia) will be of great value to WeVerify.