SAFEGUARD

SAFEguardinG pUblic spAces through intelligent thReat Detection tools

SAFEGUARD aims at developing a next-generation holistic suite of tools that significantly improve LEA capabilities to protect public spaces against terrorist attacks through the entire lifecycle of their operations. To this end, SAFEGUARD leverages the successful outcomes of EU-funded projects (S4AllCities, CONNEXIONs, CREST, PREVISION, PRAETORIAN), providing a complete and powerful framework for intelligent threat detection relevant to the context of safety of public spaces. The outcomes of the project will result in the improvement of public spaces, such as malls, open crowded areas and events by deploying tools and technologies for acquiring intelligence regarding terrorist attacks and supporting LEA operations in an efficient and effective manner. Moreover, SAFEGUARD aspires to develop knowledge on the potential use of AI techniques and algorithms related to the protection of public spaces. The SAFEGUARD framework will be validated in a series of field demonstrations based on operational use cases with the involvement of Greek and Bulgarian LEAs. Finally, the uptake of SAFEGUARD tools and technologies will be achieved through extensive training of the LEA personnel, joint exercises and training material.

M4D is the Coordinator of SAFEGUARD and responsible for the project coordination and management, the technical management of the project activities, as well as for the data management. In addition, M4D has a significant role in the project leading an Activity related to advanced intelligence gathering & analysis, where it is responsible for developing tools for (i) Web & social media monitoring, (ii) multilingual text analysis and machine translation and (iii) AI-based multimodal analytics. Moreover, M4D heavily contributes in visual monitoring & tracking sub-activities deploying (iv) object detection & tracking, (v) activity detection & recognition and (vi) crowd analysis AI-based tools. Finally, the M4D extensively contributes to the system architecture & technical requirements of the project, while also being responsible for the system integration.