Forensics is a well-established science that aims at applying various disciplines to the law, both civil and criminal, in order to solve questions related to crime. It is mainly concerned with proving and investigating infringements, identifying perpetrators and describing modus operandi. Biometrics, on the other hand, is a relatively new science that aims at measuring and analysing a person's unique characteristics, both behavioural and physical. It is mainly concerned with the development of technological solutions to extract and evaluate a person's biometric data mainly for verification and identification purposes. The potential of applying biometrics to forensics comes natural as several forensic questions rely on identifying, or verifying the identity, of people allegedly involved in crime. Although these two scientific communities have operated in relative isolation over the past couple of decades, forensic biometrics have been successfully applied through the development automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS), and most recently, through the development of face recognition systems. The potential of forensics biometrics, however, can be extended to other biometric traits, such as iris and gait analysis. This proposal also aims at consolidating the integration of multimedia forensics into the forensic science. Multimedia forensics is concerned with the development of scientific methods to extract, analyse and categorize digital evidence derived from multimedia sources, such as imaging devices. For example, developing technologies to identify, categorise and classify the source of images and video, as well as to authenticate and verify the integrity of their content. Since the enabling technologies in multimedia forensics are similar to those used for identification and verification purposes in biometric forensics, the integration of these areas is seamless.

Emerging serverless computing technologies, such as function-as-a-service (FaaS) offerings, enable developers to virtualize the internal logic of an application, simplifying management of cloud native applications and allowing cost savings through billing and scaling at the level of individual function calls. Serverless computing is therefore rapidly shifting the attention of software vendors to the problem of developing cloud applications that can use these platforms. RADON aims at creating a DevOps framework to create and manage microservices-based applications that can optimally exploit serverless computing technologies. RADON applications will include fine-grained and independently deployable microservices that can efficiently exploit FaaS and container technologies. The end goal is to broaden the adoption of serverless computing technologies within the European software industry. The methodology will strive to tackle complexity, harmonize the abstraction and actuation of action-trigger rules, avoid FaaS lock-in, and optimize decomposition and reuse through model-based FaaS-enabled development and orchestration.

The SLICE3D project is dedicated to the preparation of a scientific and innovation strategy together with a robust business plan for the realization of the Centre of Excellence on geospatial data in Slovenia. Since most of human decisions are directly or indirectly related to the location, geospatial data are nowadays a foundation for sustainable planning and development, territorial and disaster management, risk assessment, other societal benefits. The main idea is to strengthen the research and innovation capacities of Slovenia in the acquisition, processing and modelling of geospatial data. This will be realized – in the long-term – through education programs and R&D projects, resulting in tangible results supplied to market players, thereby enabling them to obtain and maintain a competitive advantage. The objectives of SLICE3D are in accordance with the national strategies, including the Slovenia’s Smart Specialization Strategy, Research and Innovation Strategy of Slovenia, Information Society Development Strategy to 2020 and Public Administration Development Strategy 2015–2020. The consortium, coordinated by the University of Ljubljana, includes governmental institutions, leading scientific institutions and business SMEs. Within the 1-year project, a formal and strong cooperation will be developed between the involved partners to provide the platform for knowledge transfer and strengthening of the research and innovation capacities in the widening country (Slovenia) and neighbourhood regions. The ambition is thus to create a Centre of Excellence which will achieve a strong long-term scientific presence at international level. Moreover, SLICE3D will be an important technology bridge for the industrial use of geospatial research results, offering scientific achievements and problem-oriented innovations to the market through different technology transfer measures. All this will ensure scientific excellence of Slovenia and its long-term development opportunities.

Functional encryption (FE), has been recently been introduced as a new paradigm of encryption systems to overcome all-or-nothing limitations of classical encryption. In an FE system the decryptor deciphers a function over the message plaintext: such functional decryptability makes it feasible to process encrypted data (e.g. on the Internet) and obtain a partial view of the message plaintext. This extra flexibility over classical encryption is a powerful enabler for many emerging security technologies (i.e. controlled access, searching and computing on encrypted data, program obfuscation…). FENTEC’s mission is to make the functional encryption paradigm ready for wide-range applications, integrating it in ICT technologies as naturally as classical encryption. The primary objective is the efficient and application-oriented development of functional encryption systems. FENTEC’s team of cryptographers, software and hardware experts and information technology industry partners that will document functional encryption needs of specific applications and subsequently design, develop, implement and demonstrate applied use of functional cryptography. Ultimately, a functional encryption library for both SW and HW-oriented application will be documented and made public so that it may be used by European ICT entities. With it, the FENTEC team will build emerging security technologies that increase the trustworthiness of the European ICT services and products. Concretely, the FENTEC team will showcase the expressiveness and versatility of the functional encryption paradigm in 3 use cases: • Privacy-preserving digital currency, enforcing flexible auditing models • Anonymous data analytics enabling computation of statistics over encrypted data, protecting European Fundamental Rights of Data Protection and Privacy • Key and content distribution with improved performance & efficiency as foundational technology for establishing secure communication among a vast amount of IOT devices.