Web and social media mining – Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group

CESAGRAM

CESAGRAM Towards a Comprehensive European Strategy Against tech-facilitated GRooming And Missing Child sexual abuse online is a growing phenomenon. The British National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) reported a 70% increase in the number of sexual communications with child offences in the last three years. The hotlines for missing children have reported concerns that grooming is an increasing factor in disappearances, particularly in cases of children who run away. In 2020, the second most common reason for children to contact Child Helplines was for reasons of violence of which 3,2% was online sexual abuse. Disappointingly, the COVID pandemic has exacerbated the problem. The COVID-19 crisis pushed 1.2 billion children out of schools, leading to children spending many more hours online. As Europol emphasised in its 2021…

PERIVALLON

PERIVALLON Protecting the EuRopean terrItory from organised enVironmentAl crime through inteLLigent threat detectiON tools PERIVALLON aims to provide an improved and comprehensive intelligence picture of organised environmental crime and develop effective and efficient tools and solutions for detecting and preventing such types of criminal activities and for assessing their environmental impact based on geospatial intelligence, remote sensing, scanning, online monitoring, analysis, correlation, risk assessment, and predictive analytics technologies, by leveraging the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fields of computer vision and multimodal analytics. As a result, enhanced investigation processes and methodologies will be derived through the capabilities provided by the developed tools and solutions, and the insights obtained though the proposed Environmental Crime Observatory. The capacity of end users (including Police Authorities and Border Guards) will also…

DYNAMO

DYNAMO Prevention, detection, response and mitigation of combined physical and cyber threats to critical infrastructure in Europe The scope of DYNAMO is to combine the two fields of business continuity management (BCM) and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) to generate a situational awareness picture for decision support across all stages of the resilience cycle (prepare, prevent, protect, response, recover). Professionals of different backgrounds will work together with end-users to develop, refine and combine selected tools into a single platform. In alignment to end-user needs, human factors, high ethical standards and societal impacts, DYNAMO includes the following goals: Resilience assessment as basis for BCM - An assessment with different levels of detail offers with varying existent data a fast or detailed evaluation of the investigated sector and helps to identify critical processes.…

LAGO

LAGO LESSEN DATA ACCESS AND GOVERNANCE OBSTACLES LAGO will deliver the foundation for a trusted EU FTC Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) to address the so-called “Data Issue” in the FCT research landscape, i.e., the lack of domain-specific data in sufficient quality and quantity to enable appropriate training and testing of the developed methods, platforms and tools. LAGO will be instrumental in identifying common barriers and subsequently providing the structural, governance and technical foundations to foster and innovate data-oriented research collaboration among LEAs, security practitioners, relevant EU agencies, academic and industry researchers, policy makers and regulators. For this purpose,LAGO will develop an evidence-based and validated multi-actor Reference Architecture for the FCT RDE for these actors to deposit, share and co-create data and tools for FCT research purposes based on common rules,…

ReSilence

ReSilence Retune the Soundscape of future cities through art and science collaboration The main objective of the ReSilence project is to support the development of art-driven technologies for designing the soundscape of future cities through the collaboration of artists, architects, urban designers, scientists, engineers and researchers, and targeting AI and XR tools addressing primarily challenges from the Urbanism/Mobility sector while exploring the borders between music and noise, and user experience measurements assessing a soundspace. The project ReSilence builds on the novel and prima facie paradoxical observation that elements of city life tend to become more silent, allowing us to question which sounds are necessary for safety and environmental awareness, and which sounds can be made more pleasant. Nowadays city planners, architects, engineers, and other scientific experts are urgently studying the…

CTC

CTC Cut The Cord With the nature of terror incidents undergoing a technology-aided transformation (e.g. use of cryptocurrencies to enhance anonymity), the monitoring and analysis of financial transactions play a pivotal role in the effort to timely prevent actions and funding of global terrorism. Financial crime exploits every aspect of digital transformation and identifies non-traditional products for financing and supporting terrorist organisations, such as social media, cryptocurrencies, and other Financial Technologies. The prevention and disruption of terrorism financing requires international cooperation and advanced investigative techniques based on new technologies. The CTC project (Cut The Cord) aims to enhance the public-private cooperation through the establishment of a wide stakeholder community, with the vision to sustain it beyond the end of the project. Joint training exercises (theoretical and hands-on) will be organised…

ODYSSEUS

ODYSSEUS Preventing, Countering and Investigation Terrorist Attacks Through Prognostic, Detection and Forensic Mechanisms for Explosive Precursors ODYSSEUS aims to increase the knowledge on homemade explosives (HMEs) and explosive precursors, including precursors not previously studied, and develop effective and efficient prognostic, detection, and forensic tools to improve the capabilities of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) towards the prevention, countering, and investigation of terrorist incidents involving HMEs. ODYSSEUS will build upon relevant previous projects mainly HOMER, through the involvement of HOMER’s core partners in this consortium, and will thus continue the work already performed in HOMER on some precursors and also further extend it to not previously studied precursors. To discover potentially hitherto unknown information, online HMEs recipes will be collected and their content will be analysed in order to extract knowledge about…

SECANT

SECANT SECurity And privacy protectioN in Internet of Things devices SECANT aims to contribute decisively towards improving the readiness and resilience of organisations against the crippling modern cyber-threats, by increasing the privacy, data protection, and accountability across the entire interconnected ICT ecosystem, and by reducing the costs for security training in the European market. To this end, the SECANT platform will enhance the capabilities of organisations’ stakeholders, by implementing (a) collaborative threat intelligence collection, analysis, and sharing; (b) innovative risk analysis specifically designed for interconnected nodes of an industrial ecosystem; (c) cutting-edge trust and accountability mechanisms for data protection, and (d) security awareness training for more informed security choices. The effectiveness and versatility of the proposed solution will be validated in four realistic pilot use case scenarios applied in the…

xR4DRAMA

xR4DRAMA Extended Reality For DisasteR management And Media plAnning The EU-funded xR4DRAMA project aims to create a solution that will improve the situational awareness of those user groups who are responsible for handling disasters, man-made crises or public events. The groups range from first responders, local authorities and security forces to media companies and event planners. Situational awareness is crucial for them to execute tasks efficiently, plan things and take the appropriate decisions. The proof of concept of this project will focus on first responders and media companies before extending the use cases to other domains. xR4DRAMA's methodology is based on X Reality (XR) technologies, and the tool can be used remotely and on site for an augmented and shared perception of a given situation. In particular, innovative technologies will…

CALLISTO

CALLISTO Copernicus Artificial Intelligence Services and data fusion with other distributed data sources and processing at the edge to support DIAS and HPC infrastructures Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already part of our lives and is extensively entering the space sector to offer value-added Earth Observation (EO) products and services. CALLISTO project integrates Copernicus data, already indexed in DIAS platforms such as ONDA-DIAS, utilising High Performance Computing infrastructures for enhanced scalability when needed. Complementary distributed data sources involve Galileo positioning data, visual content from UAVs, Web and social media data linking them with open geospatial data, in-situ sensor data. On top of these data sources, AI methods are applied to extract meaningful knowledge such as concepts, changes, activities, events, 3D-models, videos and animations of the user community. AI methods are also…

PathoCERT

PathoCERT Pathogen Contamination Emergency Response Technologies Pathogens are a determining factor in emergency response due to their life-threatening nature, both for the public as well as for the safety of first responders. In many cases, pathogen contaminations are difficult to detect, and require specialized technologies, tools and procedures to handle them. Waterborne pathogen contamination events can occur anywhere, and may be caused by various natural events or they can be the result of human activity, either accidental or malicious. During these emergencies, first responders may need to operate within a certain pre-defined incident area, and are likely to be exposed to contaminated water originating from various sources, such as surface water, wastewater or drinking water. This can pose a significant risk of illness, disease or even death, through skin contact,…

V4Design

V4Design Visual and textual content re-purposing FOR(4) architecture, Design and video virtual reality games V4Design promotes the re-use of visual and textual content, such as documentaries, paintings and their critiques so as to be repurposed and be used for the inspiration of architecture and video game (VR) designing. Visual content analysis is performed through 3D reconstruction and modelling, localization of objects in visual data, automated extraction of aesthetics/style information and language understanding from visual and textual data. 3D objects are also enhanced with semantics and explanatory text descriptions. V4Design will develop a platform that provides architects, video game creators and designers of any expertise with innovative tools necessary to enhance and simplify the creative phase of the designing process. The main idea behind V4Design is to reuse (i) visual: movies,…

TENSOR

TENSOR reTriEval and aNalysis of heterogeneouS online content for TerrOrist activity Recognition Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) across Europe face today important challenges in how they identify, gather and interpret terrorist generated content online. The Dark Web presents additional challenges due to its inaccessibility and the fact that undetected material can contribute to the advancement of terrorist violence and radicalisation. LEAs also face the challenge of extracting and summarising meaningful and relevant content hidden in huge amounts of online data to inform their resource deployment and investigations. In this context, the main objective of the TENSOR project is to provide a powerful terrorism intelligence platform offering LEAs fast and reliable planning and prevention functionalities for the early detection of terrorist organised activities, radicalisation and recruitment. The platform integrates a set of…

CONNEXIONs

CONNEXIONs InterCONnected NEXt-Generation Immersive IoT Platform of Crime and Terrorism DetectiON, PredictiON, InvestigatiON, and PreventiON Services CONNEXIONs aims to develop and demonstrate next-generation detection, prediction, prevention, and investigation services. These services will be based on multidimensional integration and correlation of heterogeneous multimodal data, and delivery of pertinent information to various stakeholders in an interactive manner tailored to their needs, through augmented and virtual reality environments. The CONNEXIONs solution encompasses the entire lifecycle of law enforcement operations including: pre-occurrence crime prediction and prevention during-occurrence LEA operations post-occurrence investigation, and crime-scene simulation and 3D reconstruction. CONNEXIONs will meaningfully enhance operational and (near) real-time situational awareness, through automated identification, interpretation, fusion and correlation of multiple heterogeneous big data sources, as well as their delivery via immersive solutions. Such multimodal data include Surface/Deep/Dark Web…

MULTISENSOR

MULTISENSOR Mining and Understanding of multilinguaL contenT for Intelligent Sentiment Enriched coNtext and Social Oriented inteRpretation The consumption of large amounts of multilingual and multimedia content regardless of its reliability and cross-validation can have important consequences on the society. An indicative example is the current crisis of the financial markets in Europe, which has created an extremely unstable ground for economic transactions and caused insecurity in the population. The fact that the national mass media provide exaggerated and contradictory information and the inaptness to understand local contexts from different countries has a considerable share in the aggravation of the crisis. To break this spiral, we need multilingual technologies with sentiment, social and spatiotemporal competence that are able to interpret, relate and summarise economic information and news created from various local…

beAWARE

beAWARE Enhancing decision support and management services in extreme weather climate events In every disaster and crisis, incident time is the enemy, and getting accurate information about the scope, extent, and impact of the disaster is critical to creating and orchestrating an effective disaster response and recovery effort. The main goal of beAWARE is to provide support in all the phases of an emergency incident. More specifically, we propose an integrated solution to support forecasting, early warnings, transmission and routing of the emergency data, aggregated analysis of multimodal data and management the coordination between the first responders and the authorities. Our intention is to rely on platforms, theories and methodologies that are already used for disaster forecasting and management and add the elements that are necessary to make them working…

MindSpaces

MindSpaces Art-driven adaptive outdoors and indoors design MindSpaces aims to create a novel approach to urban and architectural design by generating 3D-VR immersive and emotion-adaptive ‘neuro-environments’ that will help in designing emotionally-relevant urban spaces. The emotional aspects of an environment will be captured through the use of mobile EEG (Elecroencephalography) headsets, wearable bracelets/watches, and other physiological sensors that will be embedded with a VR-headset, so as to allow capturing the neuro-feedback of a VR-experience. The neuro-feedback will allow the virtual space to be adapted accordingly, resulting in an emotion-adaptive space. The ‘neuro-environments’ will be used at two levels of granularity. At the first level, artists and creatives will experience the ‘neuro-environments’ with the intention to improve the emotional-relevance of the urban space through the neuro-feedback of individuals, that have very-well…

aqua3S

aqua3S Enhancing Standardisation strategies to integrate innovative technologies for Safety and Security in existing water networks Exposure of citizens to potential disasters has led to vulnerable societies that require risk reduction measures. Drinking water is one of the main risk sources when its safety and security are not ensured. aqua3S combines novel technologies in water safety and security, aiming to standardize existing sensor technologies complemented by state-of-the-art detection mechanisms. Hence, it could propose innovative solutions to water facilities and responsible authorities in order to detect and tackle water-related crises in a timely manner. On the one hand, sensor networks are deployed in water supply networks and sources, supported by complex sensors for enhanced detection; on the other hand, sensor measurements are supported by videos from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), satellite…

CREST

CREST Fighting Crime and TerroRism with an IoT-enabled Autonomous Platform based on an Ecosystem of Advanced IntelligEnce, Operations, and InveStigation Technologies 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,…