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:

  1. pre-occurrence crime prediction and prevention
  2. during-occurrence LEA operations
  3. 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 and social media content in 7 languages (EN, FR, DE, PT, RO, ES, AR), data acquired by Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and digital evidence. CONNEXIONs will also provide chain-of-custody and path-to-court for digital evidence. The Project will adopt ethics and privacy by-design principles and will be customisable to the legislation of each member state.

CONNEXIONs will be validated in field tests and demonstrations in 3 operational use cases:

  1. counter-terrorism security in large scale public events
  2. human trafficking investigations and mitigation
  3. crime investigation and training through 3D scene reconstruction.

Extensive training of LEAs’ personnel, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and training material will boost the uptake of CONNEXIONs tools and technologies. With a Consortium of 8 LEAs from 7 European countries, 5 Research/Academic partners, and 4 industry partners, CONNEXIONs delivers a strong representation of the challenges, requirements and tools to meet its objectives.

PUBLICATIONS

  1. O. Theodosiadou, D. Chatzakou, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, “Real-time Threat Assessment based on Hidden Markov Models”, Risk Analysis 2023, vol. 43, no. 10, pp. 2069-2081, October 2023, https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14105.
  2. K. Pantelidou, D. Chatzakou, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris. "Selective Word Substitution for Contextualized Data Augmentation". In Proc. of the 27th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems (NLDB), Valencia, Spain, 15-17 June 2022, pp.508-516. OPEN ACCESS
  3. A-Μ Koufakis, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, & I. Kompatsiaris,  "M4D-MKLab/ITI-CERTH Participation in TREC Deep Learning Track 2021". Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). OPEN ACCESS
  4. K. Gkountakos, D. Galanopoulos, D. Touska, K. Ioannidis, S. Vrochidis, V. Mezaris, I. Kompatsiaris, "ITI-CERTH participation in ActEV and AVS Tracks of TRECVID 2021" in Proc. TRECVID 2021 Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, USA (Virtual), 2021. OPEN ACCESS
  5. O. Theodosiadou, K. Pantelidou, N. Bastas, D. Chatzakou, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "Change Point Detection in Terrorism-Related Online Content Using Deep Learning Derived Indicators". Information 2021, 12, 274. OPEN ACCESS
  6. Κ. Gkountakos, D. Touska, K. Ioannidis, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, & I. Kompatsiaris. "Spatio-temporal activity detection and recognition in untrimmed surveillance videos". In Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval, August 2021. OPEN ACCESS
  7. A. Kosmatopoulos, K. Loumponias, D. Chatzakou, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "Random-Walk Graph Embeddings and the Influence of Edge Weighting Strategies in Community Detection Tasks". In Proceedings of the 2021 Workshop on Open Challenges in Online Social Networks (OASIS ’21), August 30, 2021, Virtual Event, Ireland. ACM, New York, NY, USA. OPEN ACCESS
  8. G. Galanakis,; X.Zabulis,; T.Evdaimon,;S.-E. Fikenscher,; S.Allertseder,; T.Tsikrika,; S. Vrochidis "A Study of 3D Digitisation Modalities for Crime Scene Investigation". Forensic. Sci. 2021, 1, 56–85. OPEN ACCESS
  9. K. Gkountakos, K. Ioannidis, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris. "Visual Recognition of Abnormal Activities in Video Streams". In Technology Development for Security Practitioners (pp. 151-165). Cham: Springer International Publishing. OPEN ACCESS
  10. K. Gkountakos, K. Ioannidis, T.Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, & Ι. Kompatsiaris, "Crowd Violence Detection from Video Footage". In 2021 International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI). IEEE June 2021. OPEN ACCESS
  11. K. Gkountakos, D. Galanopoulos, M. Mpakratsas, D. Touska, A. Moumtzidou, K. Ioannidis, I. Gialampoukidis, S. Vrochidis, V. Mezaris, I. Kompatsiaris, "ITI-CERTH participation in TRECVID 2020", Proc. TRECVID 2020 Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, USA, Dec. 2020. OPEN ACCESS
  12. S. Mille, S. Symeonidis, M. Rousi, M. Marimon Felipe, K. Stavrothanasopoulos, P. Alvanitopoulos, R. Carlini Salguero, J. Grivolla, G. Meditskos, S. Vrochidis and L. Wanner, "A Case Study of NLG from Multimedia Data Sources: Generating Architectural Landmark Descriptions", in WebNLG+: 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Generation from the Semantic Web, (INLG 2020), 15-18 December 2020. OPEN ACCESS
  13. D. Chatzakou, J. Soler-Company, T. Tsikrika, L. Wanner, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "User Identity Linkage in Social Media Using Linguistic and Social Interaction Features", In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM on Web Science Conference, (WEBSCI 2020), July 6-10 2020. OPEN ACCESS
  14. K. Gkountakos, K. Ioannidis, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris,"A Crowd Analysis Framework for Detecting Violence Scenes", in Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR ‘20), June 8–11, 2020, Dublin, Ireland. OPEN ACCESS
  15. A. Koufakis, D. Chatzakou, G. Meditskos, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "Semantic Web Technologies in Fighting Crime and Terrorism: The CONNEXIONs Approach", Invited talk in 1st International Workshop on IoT infrastructures for safety in pervasive environments (IoT4SAFE), 2 June, 2020. OPEN ACCESS
  16. K. Gkountakos, K. Ioannidis, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris, "ITI-CERTH participation in TRECVID 2019", Proc. TRECVID 2019 Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, USA, Nov. 2019. OPEN ACCESS
  17. S. Andreadis, A. Moumtzidou, K. Apostolidis, K. Gkountakos, D. Galanopoulos, E. Michail, I. Gialampoukidis, S. Vrochidis, V. Mezaris, I. Kompatsiaris, "VERGE in VBS 2020", Proc. 26th Int. Conf. on Multimedia Modeling (MMM2020), 5-8 January 2020, Daejeon Convention Center (DCC), Korea OPEN ACCESS
  18. P. Panagiotou, G. Kalpakis, T. Tsikrika, S. Vrochidis, I. Kompatsiaris. "Query reformulation based on word embeddings: A comparative study". Technology Advances and Support for Security Practitioners of the Security Informatics and Law Enforcement book series. OPEN ACCESS