Synergies
anti-FinTer
Versatile Artificial Intelligence Investigative Technologies For Revealing Online Cross-Border Financing Activities Of Terrorism
Anti-FinTer aims to improve law enforcement capabilities, increase capacity and develop expertise in the area of terrorist financing associated with activities in the Dark Web, crypto-assets, new payment systems and darknet marketplaces. To maximize its impact and long-term sustainability of the project outcomes, particular attention will be given to establishing a long-term Public-Private Partnership (PPP) initiative through the involved partners’ connections (the EACTDΑ association, ENLETS, UN-OICT, I-LEAD and related networks). Improvements will be brought about by three distinct actions:
(a) facilitation of knowledge exchange (Knowledge Hub platform) among stakeholders and the documentation of best practices, risk analysis and policy recommendations in four workshops and multiple virtual meetings;
(b) integration of existing TRL6+ tools (e.g., GraphSense, Dark Web Monitor) to create a Toolkit for training investigators and analysts in new investigative techniques that include crypto-asset analysis, new payment channels such as the Lightning Network, text and image analysis from surface web, dark web and social media channels to identify common actors and correlate terrorist activity with cryptocurrency transactions, and artificial intelligence analytics for detecting transaction anomalies;
(c) development of training curricula and an exercise environment used in two virtual and three face-to-face training events that will be organized and carried out during the project along with two train-the-trainer events that will ensure a wider impact for the curricula, which will be made available afterwards through organizations such as Europol, CEPOL and FRONTEX.
https://twitter.com/AntiFinterNOTIONES
NOTIONES aims to build a network of academia, industry, and practitioners from security and intelligence services, that has the objective to support the needs of the security and intelligence services for future security research programming.
NOTIONES will provide the monitoring of technologies and the definition of requirements and recommendations for their industrialization, that will bring a great advantage to practitioners in the fields of intelligence and security. Through an iterative cycle, the output recommendations will be synthesized into specifications that can be provided to industry and academy across Europe, providing tangible benefits to those organisations engaged in intelligence and security.
The results of the NOTIONES project, which has a lifetime of five years, will be presented to the broad intelligence community in workshops and conferences and will contribute to the definition of further security and intelligence research.
Duration: 5 years (since September 2021)
Programme: H2020 Research and Innovation programme
Links:
CYCLOPES
The upward trend in cybercrimes represents an increasing threat to public security and citizen safety. Due to the complexity of cybercrime, EU law enforcement agencies (LEAs) require innovations from industry and academia. The EU-funded CYCLOPES project builds and maintain an innovation-driven network for LEAs against cybercrime, creating synergies between LEA, industry and the scientific community. The project includes dedicated groups identifying solutions and research activities to assist and support the development of LEAs as well as practitioner workshops to define abilities, gaps and requirements in procedures, training, legal issues and standardisation. The workshops operate in the fields of direct cybercrime impact on people, cybercrime impact on systems and digital forensics.
Duration: 5 years
Programme: H2020 Research and Innovation programme
Links:
https://www.cyclopes-project.eu/
DATACROS II
DATACROS is a research project co-funded by European Union Internal Security Fund – Police (101038736 — ISFP-2020-AG-CORRUPT) and coordinated by the research centre Transcrime – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, aimed at developing a tool to detect anomalies in firms’ ownership structure that can flag high risks of money laundering, collusion, and corruption in the European single market.
The first phase of the project (DATACROS I) was conducted between 2019 and 2021 with the participation of the French anti-corruption Authority (Agence Française Anticorruption), the Spanish Police (Cuerpo Nacional de la Policia) and investigative journalists from the IRPI consortium.
A second phase of the project (DATACROS II) started in February 2022, aiming at enhancing the Datacros prototype tool and testing it in operational scenarios with a wide range of end-users: Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), Asset Recovery Offices (AROs), Anti-corruption authorities (ACAs), Competition Authorities (CAs), and investigative journalists. The project consortium is composed by 18 institutions located in 7 different EU countries (Italy, Romania, Spain, France, Belgium, Lithuania, Czech Republic), and involves international organisations and global networks, such as Europol and the Network of Corruption Prevention Authorities (NCPA).
Links:
CC-DRIVER
CC-DRIVER is a three-year, EU-funded project investigating the drivers of cybercrime and, especially, how young people can be turned away from cybercrime to use their talents in more socially productive ways. The €5 million project began in May 2020, has 13 partners from eight countries and is co-ordinated by Trilateral Research (UK). For more information, see the CC-DRIVER website.
Links:
@CCdriverH2020TRACE
TRACE solutions enable law enforcement agencies to detect and combat money-laundering operations and the financing of organised crime and terrorism by increasing the efficiency of information sharing.
Every year, cross-border investigations into illicit money flows are hindered by fragmented e-evidence. TRACE addresses this issue by delivering a modular open-source framework for money-laundering investigations which can be tailored to meet law enforcement agencies’ needs. It will enable investigators to scrape data in any given language, analyse it and visualise the results.
TRACE is a three-year Horizon 2020 research project, assembling 17 international partners to develop solutions that will:
- Identify, track and document illicit money flows
- Disrupt illicit money flows
- Pave the way for recovering the proceeds of crime
Links:
CEASEFIRE
Ceasefire: Advanced versatile artificial intelligence technologies and interconnected cross-sectoral fully-operational national focal points for combating illicit firearms trafficking
Ceasefire is an EC-funded Horizon Europe Innovation Action that launched in October 2023. It has been designed to improve the crime-fighting ability of European nations using modern technology. Bringing together 21 expert partners from across Europe, under the coordination of Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CERTH, Greece), it is a 3-year R&D project focused on combating firearms trafficking.
Firearms trafficking holds a prominent position at the forefront of organized crime activities in Europe. Ceasefire will develop a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech and versatile approach for aiding EU Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their struggle to detect, analyze and track cross-border illicit firearms trafficking. It will deliver relevant, advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and will establish fully-operational National Focal Points (NFPs), aiming to increase LEA operational capabilities and alleviate existing organizational, cooperation, cross-jurisdictional, trans-border and information exchange challenges.
Links:
Ceasefire Project (Facebook)ATLANTIS
Improved resilience of Critical Infratsructures against large scale transnational and systemic risks
Description: Critical infrastructure sectors are of vital importance for the functioning of a society and economy – from energy and transportation to healthcare and food production. Their protection from all types of threats, including natural and synthetic, unintentional and with malicious intent, is top priority. In this context, the EU-funded project ATLANTIS is addressing resilience at the systemic level against major natural hazards and complex attacks that could potentially disrupt vital functions of the society. Bringing together 39 European partners with complementary roles and skills, ATLANTIS is improving the resilience and the protection capabilities of interconnected critical infrastructure exposed to evolving risks. It is also increasing resilience through novel, flexible, and customisable security measures and tools.
Duration: 3 years (October 2022 – September 2025)
Programme: Horizon Europe
Links:
Atlantis website
Atlantis Project (LinkedIn) Graph Massivizer
The project:
Graph-Massivizer researches and develops a high-performance, scalable, and sustainable platform for information processing and reasoning based on the massive graph representation of extreme data. It delivers a toolkit of five open-source software tools and FAIR graph datasets covering the sustainable lifecycle of processing extreme data as massive graphs. The tools focus on holistic usability (from extreme data ingestion and massive graph creation), automated intelligence (through analytics and reasoning), performance modelling, and environmental sustainability tradeoffs, supported by credible data-driven evidence across the computing continuum.
The automated operation based on the emerging serverless computing paradigm supports experienced and novice stakeholders from a broad group of large and small organisations to capitalise on extreme data through massive graph programming and processing. Graph-Massivizer validates its innovation on four complementary use cases considering their extreme data properties and coverage of the three sustainability pillars (economy, society, and environment): sustainable green finance, global environment protection foresight, green AI for the sustainable automotive industry, and data centre digital twin for exascale computing. Graph-Massivizer promises 70% more efficient analytics than AliGraph, and 30% improved energy awareness for ETL storage operations than Amazon Redshift. Furthermore, it aims to demonstrate a possible two-fold improvement in data centre energy efficiency and over 25% lower GHG emissions for basic graph operations.
Partners:
- Coordinator: UNIVERSITAET KLAGENFURT (AAU),
- IDC ITALIA SRL (IDC),
- PERACTON LIMITED (PER),
- INSTITUT JOZEF STEFAN (JSI),
- SINTEF AS (SINTEF),
- UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE (UTW),
- METAPHACTS GMBH (MPH),
- STICHTING VU (VU),
- CINECA CONSORZIO INTERUNIVERSITARIO (CINECA),
- EVENT REGISTRY SPREMLJANJE GLOBALNIH MEDIJEV D.O.O. (ER),
- ALMA MATER STUDIORUM – UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA (UNIBO),
- ROBERT BOSCH GMBH (BOSCH)
XR5.0
XR5.0: the new Human-Centric AI-Enabled Extended Reality for the Industry 5.0 Era European project, namely XR5.0 is commencing a transformative journey over the next three years, aiming to build, demonstrate, and validate a novel Person-Centric and AI-based XR paradigm that will be tailored to the requirements and nature of I5.0 applications for interested and committed stakeholders around the project results, including researchers, XR system vendors, manufacturing automation vendors and integrators, manufacturing enterprises, as well as policymakers.
With a total cost of over €10 million, including an approx. €7,6 million European Commission grant, this venture indicates a cooperative attempt to shape Human-Centric AI-Enabled Extended Reality for the Industry 5.0 Era. The main goal of XR5.0 is the creation of specific structuring principles and blueprints for using XR in I5.0 applications with emphasis on the development of innovative “XR-made-in-Europe” technology that combines with human-centric manufacturing technologies and adheres to European values.
The XR5.0 applications will consider the characteristics and context of the industrial worker based on the integration of human-centered digital twins (DTs) that comprise the “digital image” of the end-user. At the same time, XR5.0 will design and implement a unique blending of XR technology and advanced AI paradigms, including AI technologies that foster the interplay between humans and AI such as explainable AI (XAI), Active Learning (AL), Generative AI (GenAI), and Neurosymbolic Learning. The XR5.0 technologies will be coupled with a cloud based XR training platform for Operator 5.0 applications, which will enable ergonomic and personalized training of industrial workers on popular processes.
Based on the project’s outcomes, XR5.0 will cultivate a dynamic community of devoted and interested stakeholders including researchers, XR system vendors, manufacturing automation vendors and integrators, manufacturing enterprises, and policymakers. To develop the XR5.0 ecosystem and community, the project is already establishing liaisons with industrial associations, manufacturing clusters, as well as Standards Development Organisations. The XR5.0 ecosystem is to be integrated into the wider European XR and Industry 5.0 ecosystem.
Links:
XR5.0 Project (Twitter/X)
