Ensuring public spaces safety while preserving the freedom of citizens represents a challenge for European societies. Soft targets like malls, stadiums or big events continue to face a variety of evolving cyber and physical threats. To secure public spaces and other soft targets requires an integral security approach and new concepts involving all the security actors along with private operators. APPRAISE aims to build on the latest advances in big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and advanced visualisation to create an integral security framework that will improve both the cyber/physical security and safety of public spaces by enabling a proactive, integrated, risk-based, and resilience-oriented approach. This framework will be designed to support the secured private-public collaboration and optimise the coordination of operations involving private security staff, private operators, and law enforcement agencies. APPRAISE will offer unprecedented capabilities to predict and identify criminal and terrorist acts and enhance the operational collaboration of security actors before, during, and after an incident occurs. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Privacy observatories bringing together LEAs, private operators, technology experts, psychologists, sociologists, and society representatives will ensure full conformity of the developed tools with current EU legislation and citizens’ acceptance, preparing the ground for successful exploitation. The consortium consists of world-class research centres, industries, SMEs, LEAs of different types (national police, municipal police, elite tactical unit) as well as private security practitioners and operators, coordinated by a large industrial company with a leading position in the security market. APPRAISE will demonstrate its solutions in four complementary pilot sites: a tennis tournament in Italy, a transnational cycling tour with stages in France and Spain, an international fair in Poland, and a mall in Slovenia.

Ceasefire targets the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech and versatile approach for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of EU Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their struggle to detect, analyze and track cross-border illicit firearms trafficking related activities. In particular, Ceasefire efforts will concentrate on the following major driving axes: a) The development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (ΑΙ) technologies for significantly facilitating the everyday work of the involved practitioners, and b) The establishment of fully-operational National Focal Points (NFPs), by targeting to alleviate from current organizational, operational, cooperation, legal, cross-jurisdictional, trans-border and information exchange challenges. The former corresponds to a wide set of AI-enabled tools, including solutions for cyber patrolling, Web data gathering, on-the-spot detection of firearms, advanced Big Data analytics, cryptocurrency analysis, large-scale information fusion, visual analytics and firearms-related intelligence collection. On the other hand, particular attention will be given towards defining models, protocols and procedures for making NFPs fully functional, complemented by activities for mapping the various legal frameworks (within different countries) and procedures (within different agencies) for harmonizing investigations, cooperation, lawful evidence collection and forensics analysis. The development of efficient information sharing mechanisms among LEA (police, border guard, customs), judicial and forensics authorities will further reinforce the system capabilities. Moreover, the tasks of Ceasefire will complement the objectives and activities of the EU Policy Cycle (EMPACT) – Firearms (where partner MIRPN acts as Driver and partner FMI as Co-driver), while continuous guidance from the European Firearms Experts (EFE) group (where partner PSP acts as the Chair) is foreseen.

Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

Over the past decades, Europe has experienced several terrorist attacks, proving that this threat is still real and serious, while perpetrators are finding new methods to penetrate current security measures. Although grave attacks have so far been rather infrequent, it is still a reality that EU citizens may be suddenly caught up in a terrorist incident, while at the stadium, shopping in a mall, commuting, visiting a cultural venue, or in any other public space. Besides, more terrorist attacks are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and happiness among the EU population. One in five people in the EU are indeed very worried about a terrorist attack in the next 12 months. Terrorist attacks also lower EU citizens’ trust in fellow citizens, national political, legal and police institutions. SAFE-CITIES aims to support excellence in the protection of public spaces, by delivering and demonstrating a Security and Vulnerability Assessment framework, empowered by a decision-support platform for its implementation, in 4 use-cases across 5 EU countries. This will allow for simulation of complex scenarios, crowd behaviour and attacks in any space within a realistic virtual 3D environment, enabling end-users to perform comprehensive and dynamic risk and vulnerability assessments of the site investigated, to identify potential vulnerabilities against a wide number of threats and support the full engagement and cooperation of public and private actors, including citizens, into the elaboration of strategies, to make public spaces secure while preserving their open nature. The Consortium brings together 17 partners from 9 countries (Italy, Cyprus, Netherlands, Greece, Poland, UK, Belgium, Finland, Slovenia). To effectively carry out the 32 months project, the project team includes local and regional authorities, Police authorities, First Responders organizations, RTOs and academia, CSO, security industry cluster association, and high-tech SMEs specialised in security.