The aim of the EMERITUS project is to realize and implement a protocol for effective environmental crime investigation, leveraging on the integration of innovative monitoring and analysis technologies (drones, satellite data, virtual sensors, geo-intelligence data, etc.), and on a complementary training programme aimed at fostering environmental enforcement authorities (e.g. Police Authorities and Border Guards Authorities) intelligence and investigation capabilities, at national and cross-border level. In order to achieve this goal, the EMERITUS consortium has gathered 8 Police/Border Guard authorities from 5 countries, 4 security experts, 2 training specialists and 6 technological partners, that will be the core of the platform. The consortium will focus on the co-creation of an investigation protocol centered on environmental crimes investigation, that will orient to the creation of the geo-intelligence platform. This platform will integrate several monitoring and investigation technologies and data sources, in a single view to support Police Authorities and decision-makers. Secondly, a new training programme for Police Authorities and other security practitioners, focused on environmental (waste-related) crimes investigation and prevention, will be delivered combining both theoretical aspects and hand-on simulations to empower end-users to actually use the platform and related technologies. Such exercises will serve to validate both the platform and the protocol, via simulations based on 4 realistic use cases (heterogeneous and of growing complexity), taking advantage of the shared will of Police Authorities and Border Guards to focus on ad hoc demonstration sites, with the additional availability of partners’ simulation facilities. The validation of the platform and of the protocol will result in the successful elaboration of a set of evidence-based recommendations for policy authorities and decision-makers.

The ESROCOS activity is devoted to the design of a Robot Control Operating Software (RCOS) that can provide adequate features and performance with space-grade Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) properties. The goal of the ESROCOS proposal is to provide an open source framework which can assist in the generation of flight software for space robots. By providing an open standard which can be used by research labs and industry, it is expected that the elevation of TRL levels can be made more efficient, and vendor lock-in through proprietary environments can be reduced. Current state-of-the-art robotic frameworks are already addressing some of these key aspects, but mostly fail to deliver the degree of quality expected in the space environment. Terrestrial RCOS developed by industrial robot companies (e.g. VxWorks, PikeOS) are not usable for space robotics because their Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) enforce the vendor’s dependency on space development. Other open-source frameworks do not have sufficient RAMS properties for its use in space missions. The ESROCOS objectives are to: 1. Develop a Space-oriented RCOS including space-grade RAMS attributes, formal verification and qualification of industrial drivers. 2. Integrate advanced modelling technologies, separating the model from the platform 3. Focus on the space robotics community, with requirements coming from actors leading robotics missions 4. Allow integration of complex robotics applications by including the Time and Space partitioning approach 5. Avoid vendor-lock in situations by delivering an open-source solution 6. Leverage on existing assets, such as already existing frameworks properly extended, mature toolsets and libraries) 7. Ease the development of robotics systems by providing a solution interoperable with other robotics frameworks (e.g. Rock/ROS third-party libraries and visualizers/simulator) 8. Cross-pollinate with non-space solutions and applications

The need for levels of availability and scalability beyond those supported by relational databases has led to the emergence of a new generation of purpose-specific databases grouped under the term NoSQL. In general, NoSQL databases are designed with horizontal scalability as a primary concern and deliver increased availability and fault-tolerance at a cost of temporary inconsistency and reduced durability of data. To balance the requirements for data consistency and availability, organisations increasingly migrate towards hybrid data persistence architectures comprising both relational and NoSQL databases. The consensus is that this trend will only become stronger in the future; critical data will continue to be stored in ACID (predominately relational) databases while non-critical data will be progressively migrated to high-availability NoSQL databases. Moreover, as the volume and the value of natural language content constantly grows, built-in support for sophisticated text processing in data persistence architectures is increasingly becoming essential. The aim of TYPHON is to provide a methodology and an integrated technical offering for designing, developing, querying and evolving scalable architectures for persistence, analytics and monitoring of large volumes of hybrid (relational, graph-based, document-based, natural language etc.) data. TYPHON brings together research partners with a long track record of conducting internationally-leading research on software modelling, domain-specific languages, text mining and data migration, and of delivering research results in the form of robust and widely-used open-source software, industrial partners active in the automotive, earth observation, banking, and motorway operation domains, an industrial advisory board of world-class experts in the fields of databases, business intelligence and analytics, and large-scale data management, and a global consortium including more than 400 organisations from all sectors of IT.

Combating irregular migration, human smuggling, terrorism at sea, piracy, as well as arms and drug trafficking has become a high priority on Europe’s security agenda. Securing the sea requires a day-to-day collaboration activities among European actors of maritime surveillance, Member States’ administrations and European agencies principally, and a significant number of initiatives are being taken at EU level to address this challenge. The large amount of ‘raw data’ available today are not usable by systems supporting maritime security since they are not accessible at the same time and, often, they are not interoperable. Therefore, the overarching goal of MARISA project is to provide the security communities operating at sea with a data fusion toolkit, which makes available a suite of methods, techniques and modules to correlate and fuse various heterogeneous and homogeneous data and information from different sources, including Internet and social networks, with the aim to improve information exchange, situational awareness, decision-making and reaction capabilities. The proposed solution will provide mechanisms to get insights from any big data source, perform analysis of a variety of data based on geographical and spatial representation, use techniques to search for typical and new patterns that identify possible connections between events, explore predictive analysis models to represent the effect of relationships of observed object at sea. Enterprise and ad-hoc reporting and services, within the CISE context, will be provided to support users and operational systems in their daily activities, as well as presentation tools for navigating and visualizing results of data fusion processing. The involvement of 5 practitioners as full partners will allow on the one hand to align innovation to user needs, on the other hand to validate the toolkit through a number of trials addressing cross country/cross domain applications.