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.

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.

A project to build and maintain an innovation-driven network of LEAs combating cybercrime - accelerating the EU’s ability to counteract growing pressures of cyber threats. Heeding advice from EUROPOL’s EC3 flagship report Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment, CYCLOPES create synergies between LEAs from MS and connect industry and academia by stimulating and sustaining dialogue on pressing security matters threatening the stability of Europe and Citizen safety. Dedicated teams will scour markets, identifying solutions and research activities to highlight actions and innovative products to assist LEAs tackle the complexity of cybercrime. Besides technology, the project supports continued development of LEAs, working closely with practitioners to define current capacities and elicit capability gaps and requirements in crucial areas: procedures, training, legal and standardisation. Consequently, other objectives are: identification of priorities for standardisation; recommendations for innovation uptake and implementation; social, ethical and legal reports providing guidance and training suggestions for cybercrime investigators; dissemination of results through workshops, conferences, webinars, publications, policy papers and media. All outcomes will be suitably considered for exploitation - helping to propel the EU in the fight against cybercrime. Practitioners’ workshops are a driving force behind the project and cover three 3 domains: 1) cybercrime affecting people directly, 2) cybercrime affecting systems, 3) digital forensics. The project is to synchronise with other activities conducted by relevant parties EUROPOL, INTERPOL, CEPOL, ECTEG, ENISA; networks: ENLETS, ENFSI, I-LEAD, iLEAnet, EU-HYBNET, covering topics that go beyond efforts of these initiatives and preventing duplication. This also applies to projects where activities align with CYCLOPES (i-ProcureNet, Stairs4Security) and future projects funded by the EC, especially in the area of AI.

The European Commission’s latest strategy for fighting child sexual abuse highlights a harsh reality that, globally, we are ‘losing the battle’ against online child sexual abuse and exploitation (OCSEA). Various projects funded through the EU are working diligently to identify the source of CSAM on both the Clearnet and Darknet and are establishing stronger awareness of the needs and requirements of LEAs to fight the overloading volume of images, text, media files, etc. However, the IOCTA 2021 report also brings a chilling honesty that the prevalence of materials shows no sign of slowing or stabilising. The adage that prevention is better than the cure never seemed more fitting. The 2PS project condemns all forms of sexual abuse and exploitation – and there are no excuses that justify behaviours and actions that harm or victimise children. However, to reduce the number of abused children and those at risk of exploitation, we need to address various challenges. Several of those relate to people with a sexual interest in children and their needs to divert them from abusing. 2PS, which stands for Prevent & Protect Through Support is a highly innovative action offering a paradigm shift in the approach to tackling child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) across Europe. The highly qualified and diverse consortium – together with leading global actors – are committed to laying the foundations for new coherent modus operandi that complement the reactive approaches currently favoured. This is achieved by addressing the support needs of people with a sexual interest in children and people who feel they might offend. We will share the best practices for guidance, therapy and treatment methods – combined with new training and awareness for frontline support workers and LEAs. We aim to move preventive actions to the forefront, offering alternative courses of action to existing offenders and people who fear they might offend– including people with a sexual interest in children.

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.