With the rise and spread of ICT-enabled crimes and illicit financial flows (IFFs), law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and financial intelligence units (FIUs) need innovative policing tools in the virtual sphere as well as skills, organisational and regulatory adaptations to counter these threats. TRACE will focus on input (forming initial suspicion), processing (substantiating suspicion, collecting evidence, locating suspects and their assets) and output (producing court proof / admissible e-evidence) to develop ICT-enabled solutions to identify, track and document IFFs, to pave the way for recovering the proceeds of crime and to disrupt the IFFs. TRACE will apply its solutions in use cases on terrorist financing, web forensics, cyber extortion, use of cryptocurrencies in property market transactions, money laundering in arts and antiquities, and online gambling, all of which have been developed in consultation with LEAs. TRACE will make recommendations on harmonisation of information formats in suspicious activity reports. Heretofore the differences and fragmented use of e-evidence in criminal justice processes have hindered cross-border investigations, prosecutions and convictions and recovery of assets. TRACE will create an open source platform for LEAs and for advancements in technology-based solutions in policing. With stakeholder engagement from the outset, the TRACE partners will co-develop advanced investigation tools and test and validate their efficacy in detecting IFFs. TRACE will also create a working group of partner LEAs and Stakeholder Board LEAs to discuss good practices in information sharing among EU LEAs. The project will create a Stakeholder Board of about 20 key stakeholders and an Ethics Advisory Board comprising four external ethics experts and two partners. TRACE has a multidisciplinary consortium comprising LEAs, AI technology companies, academia, research institutes and NGOs with track records of delivering cutting edge EU projects.

ANITA will design and develop a novel knowledge-based user-centred investigation system for analysing heterogeneous (text, audio, video, image) online (Surface Web, Deep Web, DarkNet) and offline content for fighting illegal trafficking of drugs, counterfeit medicines, NPS and firearms. ANITA will combine a) innovative data source analysis of crypto-currency network and transactions and blockchain technologies; b) advanced Big Data analytics tools for automatic analysis of the vast amounts of multimodal content of the identified sources; c) sophisticated methodologies for capturing, modelling and inferring knowledge in human understandable forms (e.g. expressive ontologies), extracting also relevant and new knowledge from neural networks and formally storing it in the form of ontologies; d) development of an adaptive, cognitive user modelling framework that will capture, analyse, interpret, mimic and integrate key human cognitive and information processing functions for: i) incarnating the incorporation of human perception/cognition principles in the system processing pipelines (i.e. integrating the investigators ‘in-the-loop’ of the overall analysis process) and ii) facilitate the transfer of domain knowledge from the expert users to the novice ones; e) domain-related and user-oriented intelligence applications, which will enable users to identify patterns for spatial, temporal and causal correlations among illegal trafficking events, entities and activities and to support decision-making processes for countermeasures to undertake. All the above functionalities will be coupled and reinforced by an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of the online illegal trafficking phenomenon (including the study of reaction strategies and countermeasures) and a thorough analysis of the online resources with respect to social, ethical, legal and privacy issues of concern. The proposed system capabilities will be demonstrated in multiple relevant operational environments.