The increasing complexity of security challenges combined with the accumulation of significant amounts of digital data calls for better and more widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for law enforcement agencies (LEAs). AI can provide benefits to LEAs at all levels given the right understanding, tools, data and protection while increased awareness of criminal misuse is providing an immediate and concerning threat that must be tackled rapidly. Furthermore, a community that brings together LEAs, researchers, industry, security practitioners and other actors in the security ecosystem under a coordinated and strategic effort is essential for the realisation of these efforts into operational practices. STARLIGHT presents an inclusive and sustainable vision for increasing the awareness, capability, adoption and long-term impact of AI in Europe for LEAs. Five strategic goals underpin STARLIGHT’s approach: (1) Improve the widespread UNDERSTANDing of AI across LEAs to reinforce their investigative and cybersecurity operations and the need to uphold legal, ethical and societal values; (2) Provide opportunities to LEAs to EXPLOIT AI tools and solutions in their operational work that are trustworthy, transparent and human-centric; (3) Ensure that LEAs can PROTECT their own AI systems through privacy- and security-by-design approaches, better cybersecurity tools and knowledge; (4) Raise LEAs’ expertise and capacity to COMBAT the misuse of AI-supported crime and terrorism; and (5) BOOST AI for LEAs in Europe through high-quality datasets, an interoperable and standardised framework for long term sustainability of solutions, and the creation of an AI hub for LEAs that supports a strong AI security industry and enhances the EU’s strategic autonomy in AI. STARLIGHT will ensure European LEAs lead the way in AI innovation, autonomy and resilience, addressing the challenges of now and the future, prioritising the safety and security of Europe for all.

Discovering criminal networks and identifying their members is one of the primary aspects of LEAs' mission. ROXANNE will contribute towards this goal by bridging the strengths of speech and language technologies (SLTs), visual analysis (VA) and network analysis (NA). If funded, ROXANNE will achieve a significant increase in the speed of investigation processes and an improvement in identification of individuals by means of speech, in the scope of criminal cases where large amounts of lawfully intercepted communications (with multilingual attributes) are analysed. The technical development will be centred around the ROXANNE platform, which will enhance criminal network analysis capabilities by providing a framework for extracting evidence and actionable intelligence based on speech, language and video technologies. The intention is not to replace humans but automate time-consuming tasks, and support LEA decision-making. Its early version will offer preliminary SLT, VA and NA capabilities to collect end-user feedback. The final version will provide multilingual, probabilistic tools interfacing SLT and NA technologies, boosted by natural language processing (NLP) and relation analysis in the synoptic criminal activity graph. ROXANNE will achieve full compliance with relevant INTERPOL and EU legal and ethical frameworks, including innovative approaches to data protection management such as privacy by design. Special efforts will be expended to ensure ROXANNE outcomes achieve widespread adoption by law enforcement. The effort will be enhanced through a series of education and awareness campaigns and the direct involvement of LEAs from nine European countries, that will test our solutions on real case data. In addition, ROXANNE partner INTERPOL and EUROPOL (member of the External Advisory Board) will provide advice and guidance. The consortium has 24 partners with complementary skills, including leaders in key technology areas impacting criminal investigations.

TENSOR will provide LEAs a platform that facilitates the biometric evidence extraction, sharing and storage in cross border environments allowing them to share best practices in an automated, robust, secure, privacy-preserving and scalable manner. In addition, the full potential of biometrics technologies will be exploited and their fusion in case of partial evidence gathered in the crime scenes by forensic institutes strengthening their acceptance in the court of justice. More particularly, TENSOR will equip security practitioners with novel tools focusing on (a) Extraction of biometrics and other more or less distinctive features validated in forensic conditions that assist LEAs in identification, identity verification, intelligence and investigation processes and can be leveraged to unlock criminals’ mobile devices; (b) Sharing of biometrics through secure, automated, scalable exchange of biometric intelligence and court-proof evidence among LEAs in a cross-border manner, enhancing interoperability among legacy systems owned by security practitioners and Forensic Institutes; and (c) Storage of biometrics in a privacy-preserving way through a biometric data protection mechanism enabling revocability of biometric templates. TENSOR will also introduce the one-of-its-kind European Biometric Data Space creating a common ground among LEAs, Forensic Institutes and Security Researchers assisting in the faster adoption of modern biometric solutions.

Project “Together Against Crime by Education” No. 2015-1-CZ01-KA202-013916 of Erasmus+ programme was primarily designed for forensic technicians and forensic experts. The target of the course was to create, for these groups of policepersons, new courses of further specialist training that would be, within the frameworks of an identical curriculum, taught at the police schools of all the three participating countries, it means the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. The complete project documentation was approved at international project meetings that formed the spine of the project. To be able to verify the correctness and completeness of the content of the courses and of the pedagogical strategies of the teachers, altogether seven 5-day pilot courses took place and these were attended by forensic experts from the police forces of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Four pilot courses were for a group of forensic technicians and three pilot courses were for forensic experts. A course evaluation in the form of a questionnaire represented an inseparable part of each course. Every successful participant of a particular course received a certificate. The content of the newly created courses will be integrated into the police education which means that sustainability of the outcomes of the project will be ensured. Meanwhile the participants of the pilot courses have taken the role of trainers at their workplaces and inform their colleagues about the course of the project and they pass their knowledge and skills on their colleagues. To ensure dissemination of the project, information brochures are distributed to forensic and expert police workplaces and also the project coordinators may take part at events concerning forensic and expert activities. An information video represents another outcome of the project and it introduces policepersons to the Erasmus+ programme, project activities and the project outcomes. 140 policepersons and civilian workers of the police forces of the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia were engaged to control, organize and carry out the whole project. The project was executed between 1 September 2015 and 31 August 2017. The project was provided the EU grant money of € 185,759.

The ILEAnet project will set up and develop a sustainable network of Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) practitioner organisations from all over Europe. The mission of this network will be to stimulate LEA capabilities to influence, develop and take up research, development and innovation (RDI) that is useful and usable for LEAs, and thereby help them to tackle the major challenges they face. The network will be organised around ILEAnet National Contacts (INCs) who will be in charge of federating the respective networks of practitioners, policy makers, academics, industrial players and other RDI stakeholders in their respective countries. ILEAnet will also operate as a community of people with a common interest in exchanging and collaborating with respect to LEA challenges and needs and LEA-centred RDI. Whilst the organisational ILEAnet Network will be focused – “top-down” - on specific challenges, the ILEAnet Community of people will contribute “bottom-up” ideas to produce innovative approaches to face newly arising challenges. An online community platform will enable professional social networking and mutual online assistance related to new solutions and best practice to address LEA challenges. The platform will support online and physical meetings and discussions, and will provide the infrastructure for efficient knowledge management. Synthesising top-down approaches and bottom-up ideas in iterative survey-organise-brainstorm-analyse-propose-discuss-poll processes, ILEAnet will build up a broad portfolio of RDI results and new RDI project concepts, and will deliver recommendations for future RDI policies. ILEAnet will hence catalyse innovation between LEAs and between LEAs, academics and industry. This will enable LEAs not only to take up mature results but also to prepare and influence future RDI efforts which could be taken up by individual or groupings of organisations and countries as well as by European research funding programmes.