The term first responders usually refers to law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical personnel. These responders, however, are not the only assets that may be required in the aftermath of a strike on the homeland. In contrast, the more appropriate term, emergency responders, comprises all personnel within a community that might be needed in the event of a natural or technological (man-made) disaster or terrorist incident. These responders might include hazardous materials response teams, urban search and rescue assets, community emergency response teams, anti-terrorism units, special weapons and tactics teams, bomb squads, emergency management officials, municipal agencies, and private organizations responsible for transportation, communications, medical services, public health, disaster assistance, public works, and construction. In addition, professional responders and volunteers, private nonprofit, nongovernmental groups (NGOs), such as the Red Cross, can also play an important role in emergency response. As a result, the tasks that a national emergency response system would be required to perform are more complex than simply aiding victims at the scene of a disaster, carried out by several kinds of professional users with different roles and expertise. Moreover, emergency preparedness and response lifecycle is a complex process that consists of the preparation, response, and recovery from a disaster, including planning, logistical support, maintenance and diagnostics, training, and management as well as supporting the actual activities at a disaster site and post-recovery after the incident.

MAGNETO addresses significant needs of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in their fight against terrorism and organised crime, related to the massive volumes, heterogeneity and fragmentation of the data that officers have to analyse for the prevention, investigation and prosecution of criminal offences. These needs have been identified after consulting with eleven different European LEAs –members of the MAGNETO consortium. In response, MAGNETO empowers LEAs with superior crime analysis, prevention and investigation capabilities, by researching and providing tailored solutions and tools based on sophisticated knowledge representation, advanced semantic reasoning and augmented intelligence, well integrated in a common, modular platform with open interfaces. By using the MAGNETO platform, LEAs will have unparalleled abilities to fuse and analyse multiple massive heterogeneous data sources, uncover hidden relationships among data items, compute trends for the evolution of security incidents, ultimately (and at a faster pace) reaching solid evidence that can be used in Court, gaining also better awareness and understanding of current or past security-related situations. In parallel, MAGNETO will spark an ecosystem of third-party solution providers benefiting from its open, modular and reusable architectural framework and standard interfaces. To achieve these objectives, MAGNETO will test and demonstrate its developments on five representative and complementary use cases (types of crime), under real-life operational conditions in the facilities of eleven different LEAs, keeping them continuously in the production loop, adopting an agile implementation methodology and a multi-disciplinary scientific approach, combining researchers with exceptional track records, officers with top-level operational know-how in law enforcement, recognised experts for legal and ethical compliance to EU and national standards, and qualified training experts for innovative curricula development.

EU Personnel in Conflict Prevention and Peace Building missions come from diverse organizations and nations, yet must coordinate together in the temporary network or umbrella organization that comprises each CPPB mission. Coordination is challenging strategically and operationally. Even if the structures to coordinate together are in place, diversity in organizations (militaries, police forces, civil organizations), gender and culture (national, ethnicity, religion) make understanding of diverse personnel, and effective communication and cooperation in contexts of diversity difficult yet vital in order to achieve CPPB missions' goals. Current training puts few resources into training personnel in these critical soft skills. Gaming for Peace (GAP) provides an efficient and effective means of developing and delivering a curriculum in those skills. Deriving a base curriculum from CPPB relevant soft skills and end user identified training gaps in this area, GAP designs a multiple player online role playing game which simulates scenarios from CPPB missions. The GAP project launches an iterative process of curriculum development and refinement through end users (military, police and civilian personnel) evaluating the game and embedded base curriculum by playing the game and in doing so, bringing their own experiences to the game, thus further developing the curriculum of CPPB relevant soft skills. The game can be accessed anywhere via the Internet and there is no limit on the number of personnel who can be trained. The game can be customized at low cost by different stakeholders. The GAP consortium is multidisciplinary with expertise in the social sciences, computer science, end users (including militaries and police), and SMEs in game design, curriculum development and skill standardization and harmonization, and has support from stakeholders including the ESDC, UN bodies and NATO.