Discovering criminal networks and identifying their members is one of the primary aspects of LEAs' mission. ROXANNE will contribute towards this goal by bridging the strengths of speech and language technologies (SLTs), visual analysis (VA) and network analysis (NA). If funded, ROXANNE will achieve a significant increase in the speed of investigation processes and an improvement in identification of individuals by means of speech, in the scope of criminal cases where large amounts of lawfully intercepted communications (with multilingual attributes) are analysed. The technical development will be centred around the ROXANNE platform, which will enhance criminal network analysis capabilities by providing a framework for extracting evidence and actionable intelligence based on speech, language and video technologies. The intention is not to replace humans but automate time-consuming tasks, and support LEA decision-making. Its early version will offer preliminary SLT, VA and NA capabilities to collect end-user feedback. The final version will provide multilingual, probabilistic tools interfacing SLT and NA technologies, boosted by natural language processing (NLP) and relation analysis in the synoptic criminal activity graph. ROXANNE will achieve full compliance with relevant INTERPOL and EU legal and ethical frameworks, including innovative approaches to data protection management such as privacy by design. Special efforts will be expended to ensure ROXANNE outcomes achieve widespread adoption by law enforcement. The effort will be enhanced through a series of education and awareness campaigns and the direct involvement of LEAs from nine European countries, that will test our solutions on real case data. In addition, ROXANNE partner INTERPOL and EUROPOL (member of the External Advisory Board) will provide advice and guidance. The consortium has 24 partners with complementary skills, including leaders in key technology areas impacting criminal investigations.

EXERTER connects 22 practitioners from 13 EU Member States into a Network with Explosives Specialists within the Security of Explosives (SoE) area. The objective of the EXERTER Network is to bridge the difficulties for security practitioners to capture and utilize research results and to direct the industry’s innovation efforts to address the most pressing needs in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. Practitioners will via EXERTER get improved operational capability via novel technologies, methods and knowledge to aid them in executing more efficient countermeasures in a changing threat environment. In cooperation with key practitioners in the Network, the project will each year define one unique scenario based on past events to facilitate the identification of capability gaps along different counter-terrorist phases associated with PREVENT, DETECT, MITIGATE and REACT. With its explosives expertise, EXERTER will provide recommendations to the SoE community on how these gaps can be countered by (i) directing innovators into targeted areas to which research programmes should focus, (ii) proposing standardization priority areas and (iii) advising on exploitation and commercialisation opportunities. Ongoing research activities will continuously be reviewed to promote practitioners’ uptake of results and knowledge. Academia and research institutes will be supported by the technical expertise within EXERTER to lower exploitation barriers for promising research by enhancing their interaction with security industry. EXERTER will assess evolving threats requiring immediate attention of the SoE community - thus widely addressing emerging technologies and trends. Annual interaction workshops will be held where explosives practitioners, research institutes and academia as well as industry gather to discuss the current state of play and future roadmaps to answer to urgent capability requirements.

ENTRAP will deliver combined operational research (OR) methods for assessing and identifying emerging and future counter-measures. The tools will be used for identifying the needed step-changes for countering present, emerging and future explosive threats. The OR tools will encompass methods including morphological analysis, attack-defence trees, Bow-tie diagrams and wargaming. The tools have been well-established for decades and they will be further developed and adapted for explosive threats. The proposed research aims to assess the effectiveness of counter-tools and their combinations across the plot. This will give a value on the efficiency they can provide for historical cases or emerging and future scenarios for an attack. The project will strive to identify commonalities in the timeline where a counter-tool can be effective for several different scenarios. Thus, an effectiveness assessment will be made not only across the timeline for one scenario but also across different scenarios. The research and development efforts on a European level over the last decades will be a main source of background data. A gap analysis over the plot will in combination with the OR methods identify the need of required preventive counter-measures. A gap bridging assessment will together with the researcher and practitioner think-tank in ENTRAP ensure a step-change vision of counter-tools for important gaps. Historical attacks, scenarios defined in FP 7 projects, the EU Matrix group and NDE will be used as the basis. A cost assessment will be included giving an estimate for the required further developments. The ENTRAP consortium will bring together a world-leading team where the consortium includes 11 practitioners supported by an advisory board of key entities whereof 18 Letter of Supports have been obtained.