The Mediterranean and Black Sea region is characterised by a very volatile and dynamically changing security environment that pose severe threats and challenges on the societies and prosperity. The MEDEA project, during its 60 months of implementation provides funding for four interrelated actions: (i) Establish and Operate the MEDEA network, a multi-disciplinary network of security practitioners, with active links to policy makers and users/providers of security innovations across the M&BS countries focusing in Border Protection and other Security- and Disaster-Related tasks. During the project duration, MEDEA members will engage in activities towards maintaining its sustainability and longevity after the financing of this project ends, (ii) Engage participants in anticipatory governance on emerging security challenges that the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions would face in the coming years (present until +10 years), which concretely operationalizes the backbone of the project in a triple structure: a) understanding unsatisfactory state of play, b) design the desirable future and c) define a resilient pathway on how to achieve this, (iii) Push for the “co-creation” of security technology and capabilities innovations between practitioners and innovation suppliers, which is based upon their evaluation and prioritization on multi-criteria analysis (technology, operational and cost-benefit, etc.) and also linked to Human Development, Policy Making and Organizational Improvements in-terms of facilitating its use by the practitioners (iv) Establish and annually update the Mediterranean Security Research and Innovation Agenda (MSRIA), that identifies areas where security & defence research is needed and the establishment of recommendations for European Security & Defence technology investments.

Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) across Europe face today important challenges in how they identify, gather and interpret terrorist generated content online. The Dark Web presents additional challenges due to its inaccessibility and the fact that undetected material can contribute to the advancement of terrorist violence and radicalisation. LEAs also face the challenge of extracting and summarising meaningful and relevant content hidden in huge amounts of online data to inform their resource deployment and investigations. In this context, the main objective of the TENSOR project is to provide a powerful terrorism intelligence platform offering LEAs fast and reliable planning and prevention functionalities for the early detection of terrorist organised activities, radicalisation and recruitment. The platform integrates a set of automated and semi-automated tools for efficient and effective searching, crawling, monitoring and gathering online terrorist-generated content from the Surface and the Dark Web; Internet penetration through intelligent dialogue-empowered bots; Information extraction from multimedia (e.g., video, images, audio) and multilingual content; Content categorisation, filtering and analysis; Real-time relevant content summarisation and visualisation; Creation of automated audit trails; Privacy-by-design and data protection. The project brings together industry, LEAs, legal experts and research institutions. It is expected that this collaboration will have significant impact on 1) ensuring the final system meets end-user LEA requirements, 2) enabling LEAs to access and examine terrorist generated content online bringing significant advantages to their operational capability, and 3) promoting industry’s enhanced understanding of operational LEA requirements and their market competitiveness in the field of online organised crime, terrorism and harmful-radicalisation.

Handling the crises faced by modern societies often requires the coordination of multiple types of stakeholders from different countries. One of the key requirements to manage crisis is to have access to situational awareness (SA). However, current SA solutions (SAS) are not adapted to operate in cross-border contexts and present several shortcomings related to interoperability, data management/processing, decision making, standardisation and procurement. This hinders a reliable sharing of SA information. SAYSO will address these shortcomings and pave the way for the development of innovative European cost-effective Multi-Stakeholders SA Systems (MSSAS) which will provide practitioners with user-friendly solutions, providing a clear picture of the situation at hand with relevant advices. Addressing both the technical and human aspects of technology implementation, SAYSO will define the specifications of future MSSAS on the basis of practitioners’ requirements and specify the corresponding Reference Architecture to support the integration of various data into a common operational picture. This architecture will support interoperability and allow the integration of legacy and future SAS. It will also be customisable to practitioners’ needs and safeguard adequate privacy protection and data security levels. SAYSO will pursue the agreement and sustainable involvement of a community of practitioners, relevant suppliers and potential procurers, institutions and policy makers to obtain widely accepted results and prepare future procurement actions at EU level. SAYSO will develop a toolkit for MSSAS procurers, which will include tender documentation for SAYSO-compliant MSSAS and a SAYSO Procurers Handbook (with tools to evaluate MSSAS tenders and assess their compliance with the SAYSO specifications and existing standards). A registry of potential suppliers and procurers of MSSAS will be set up. Finally, SAYSO will deliver roadmaps for future MSSAS and standardisation.