VANGUARD aims to strengthen the fight against trafficking in human beings (THB) at the nexus of advanced technological solutions, understanding, awareness raising, and training in order to disrupt the trafficking chain at an early stage and address the culture of impunity. In particular, VANGUARD aims to provide an improved intelligence picture of THB, with particular focus on THB for purposes of sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, and forced criminality. This will be achieved through developing a modular and trustworthy suite of tools for detecting, identifying, investigating, and preventing online-facilitated THB activities and THB-related activities at (border) checkpoints based on the analysis of online multimedia content and multimodal streams, by leveraging the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It will also address the societal dimensions of THB through improved understanding and engagement with relevant actors, improved strategies of international cooperation, increased awareness, and better evidence-based policymaking. The capacity of end users (including Police and Border Guard Authorities) will be further enhanced and will enable them to tackle such criminal activities in an effective manner based on advanced tools and solutions and on innovative training curricula. VANGUARD will be validated in field tests and demonstrations in three operational use cases. Extensive training, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and training material will boost the uptake of VANGUARD tools and technologies. With a Consortium of seven Police and Border Guard Authorities (including from countries of origin and transit of THB networks and countries neighbouring Ukraine), one Police Academy, eight research/academic institutions, four industry partners (including two SMEs), and two CSOs, VANGUARD delivers a strong representation of the challenges, requirements, and tools to meet its objectives.

CREST aims to equip LEAs with an advanced prediction, prevention, operation, and investigation platform by leveraging the IoT ecosystem, autonomous systems, and targeted technologies and building upon the concept of multidimensional integration and correlation of heterogeneous multimodal data streams (ranging from online content to IoT-enabled sensors) for a) threat detection and assessment, b) dynamic mission planning and adaptive navigation for improved surveillance based on autonomous systems, c) distributed command and control of law enforcement missions, d) sharing of information and exchange of digital evidence based on blockchain, and e) delivery of pertinent information to different stakeholders in an interactive manner tailored to their needs. CREST will also provide chain-of-custody, and path-to-court for digital evidence. Human factors and societal aspects will also be comprehensively addressed, while information packages for educating the wider public on identifying threats and protecting themselves will be prepared and distributed.The platform development will adopt ethics and privacy by-design principles and will be customisable to the legislation of each member state. CREST will be validated in field tests and demonstrations in three operational uses cases: 1) protection of public figures in motorcades and public spaces, 2) counter terrorism security in crowded areas, and 3) Cross-border fight against organised crime (e.g. firearms trafficking). Extensive training of LEAs' personnel, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and training material, will boost the uptake of CREST tools and technologies. With a Consortium of 8 LEAs from 8 European countries, 7 research/academic institutions, 1 civil organisation, and 7 industry partners, CREST delivers a strong representation of the challenges, the requirements and the tools to meet its objectives.

METICOS aims to introduce Big Data Analysis of border control information systems, in order to provide a step-change towards more modern and efficient Smart Border management and towards gaining societal and political acceptance of modern control technologies of EU borders such as “no gate solutions”. It is therefore positioned as an initiative to create a real-time decision-support system with regard to different Smart Border control technologies that empowers two major stakeholder groups within the European border control sector (i.e., travellers and border control authorities & service providers) to ensure user acceptance, secure positive societal impact and maximize border control process efficiency. To this end, the METICOS project will develop a platform that integrates information systems and networks of data sources in order to validate the efficiency and users acceptance of border control technologies. The proposed platform will provide metrics and KPIs to authorities and decision makers, based on a number of independent variables: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, physical privacy, accuracy, information privacy, ethical and societal perceptions. To maximize impact of the project, METICOS will join the European Initiative for Smart Borders and contribute aforementioned cross-border and cross-cultural Big Data Analysis and decision support systems that feature harvesting of multi-lingual and cross-sectorial data from heterogeneous sources, different analytics approaches and risk assessment methods. METICOS will be demonstrated and validated under real operating conditions. This will involve two pilot implementations executed at five different countries involving real travellers and staff. Furthermore, the METICOS ecosystem aims to work closely with border control research initiatives to demonstrate its operational performance improvements by means of combined validation with these solutions.

PROPHETS will look at redefining new methods to prevent, investigate and mitigate cybercriminal behaviours through the development of a coherent, EU-wide, adaptive SECURITY MODEL, built upon the interplay of the human factors within the new cyber ecosystem and capable of addressing the four fundamental dimensions at the core of the phenomenon: 1. early identification of security threats; 2. investigations within a new public-private governance; 3. Increased complexity of the response due to the expansion of the security perimeter towards new societal fields and the emergence of challenging jurisdictional problems; and, last but not least, 4. perception of security and freedoms among citizens, which requires a new communication strategy for LEAs and security policy makers.

The proposed solution aims to deliver a descriptive and predictive data analytics platform and related tools using state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to prevent, detect, analyse, and combat criminal activities. AIDA will focus on cybercrime and terrorism, by addressing specific challenges related to law enforcement investigation and intelligence. While cybercrime and terrorism pose distinct problems and may rely on different input datasets, the analysis of this data can benefit from the application of the same fundamental technology base framework, endowed with Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning techniques applied to big data analytics, and extended and tailored with crime- and task- specific additional analytic capabilities and tools. The resulting TRL-7 integrated, modular and flexible AIDA framework will include LE-specific effective, efficient and automated data mining and analytics services to deal with intelligence and investigation workflows, extensive content acquisition, information extraction and fusion, knowledge management and enrichment through novel applications of Big Data processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive and visual analytics. AIDA system and tools will be made available to LEAs through a secure sandbox environment that aims to raise the technological readiness level of the solutions through their application in operational environment with real data.