The 17th Edition of the closed-door Strategic Workshop was held in Villa Mondragone, Italy from the 18th to the 20th of May, 2015. The focus during the active 2-day discussions of the participating major stakeholders was on HBC, addressing concept, systems, network security, and future strategy.

The theme for the Strategic Workshop 2015 (SW’15) was Human Bond Communications (HBC): The Human Bond Communications (HBC) is a holistic approach to describe and transmit the features of a subject in the way human perceives it. This communication will involve all the five senses for modelling the physical subject into information domain, actuating and transmitting through communication platform. This will let the physical subject to be understood by two mutually agreeing users of Human Bond Communications in the way subject observed by individual users separately. Modern dexterous communication technology is progressively enabling humans to communicate their information through them with speech (aural) and media (optical) as underpinning essence. Humans realize this kind of aural and optical information by their optical and auditory senses. However, due to certain constraints, the ability to incorporate the other three sensory features namely, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile are still far from reality. Human Bond Communications is a novel concept that incorporates olfactory, gustatory, and tactile that will allow more expressive and holistic sensory information exchange through communication techniques for more human sentiment centric communication. This concept