AVALANCHE Vision: While technological solutions for investigations and global cooperation do exist, they are mostly fragmented and myopic focusing on providing very narrow and isolated functions within their own boundaries without ensuring interoperability and international cooperation. To alleviate the limitations of existing solutions, AVALANCHE aims to make transformative steps towards the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech, and versatile solution for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of LEAs in their struggle to detect, analyse, track, investigate and prevent cross-border illicit activities of high-risk criminal networks, migrant smuggling, firearms, drugs, child exploitation, terrorism, cyber and intellectual property crime coordinated through the digital world. Building on Pillars I and II, the AVALANCHE platform will offer tools for semi-automatic collection of evidence to foster explainable investigations and reasoning through intelligence-led methods and contextual-aware gleaning of actions. Also, building on Pillar III, the AVALANCHE platform will provide interoperable systems and interconnection with national and international databases through common standards, data and schemas alignment, and mediation to foster information exchange and international cooperation. To guarantee the wide SMEs solutions adoption by the actual practitioners, AVALANCHE will produce training curricula, benchmark with Europol’s Innovation Lab, contribute to LEAs operational standards and establish a broad ecosystem of crime-relevant stakeholders, and complement its objectives by continuously receiving guidance from the EU Policy Instrument (EMPACT). Finally, AVALANCHE will validate the integrated platform through a demonstration in diverse business scenarios of HP that cover key operational domains (from cross-border illicit activities to antisemitism, and more) with notable societal and market impact.

The main objective of the SafeShore project is to cover existing gaps in coastal border surveillance, increasing internal security by preventing cross-border crime such trafficking in human beings and the smuggling of drugs. It is designed to be integrated with existing systems and create a continuous detection line along the border. One of the treats to the maritime coast are small Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) which can carry explosives or which can be used for smuggling drugs, boats and human intruders on the sea shore. The SafeShore core solution for detecting small targets that are flying at low attitude is to use a 3D LIDAR that scans the sky and creates above the protected area a virtual dome shield. SafeShore will also integrate the 3D LIDAR with passive acoustic sensors, passive radio detection and video analytics. One of SafeShore specific objectives will be to cover 1500-m1800m along the coastal border. This will be done with 3 mobile platforms. Each one of those will cover itself with a dome-shaped virtual detection shield with a radius of about 250m to 300m. There will be approximately 50 meters overlapping between the platforms. The overlapping will create a continuous detection shield along the shore. The SafeShore objective will be to demonstrate the detection capabilities in the missing detection gaps of other existing systems such as costal radars, thereby also ensuring the fusion of information and increasing the situational awareness and better implementation of the European Maritime Security Strategy based on the information exchange frameworks, EUROSUR and EUCISE 2020. All SafeShore objectives are measurable, realistic and achievable within the duration of the project, as the SafeShore project will build 3 prototypes that are going to assess the accomplishment of the objectives. Three end-user scripted and end-user validated field trials will be set up to validate these systems: in the North Sea, Black Sea and Mediterranean.

Recent scholarship on y the gender dimension in preventing and countering violent extremism programming, still lacks thorough gender-sensitive data collection and analysis. On the one hand, empirical data and a gender-sensitive approach in counter violent extremism is needed to create lasting security. On the other hand, violent extremism concept does not have an agreed definition. The literature on Traditional Counterterrorism (TC) policy has been conducted from a gender-blind perspective, at the most adding women and “stirring” them into the existent mix, instead of meaningfully re-examining the underlying issues of gender and diversity dynamics. In this context, it is important to critically examine how the unequal socialization can lead to violence and become a driver of VE (Violent Extremism) by bringing in the feminist and intersectional perspectives into research design, data collection and analysis. A better understanding of the causes, manifestations, and mitigation practices of violent extremism is required, by critically examining the relationship between gender and extremism, investigating gender-specific factors for radicalization, such as community belonging, social connections, traumas or empowerment narratives. AMALTHEA will address the challenge of limited access to knowledge, collaboration and unified approaches against gender-related radicalisation via in-depth research and delivery of innovation in three complementary fields: (i) Knowledge creation, targeting LEAs, CSOs, social support professionals, teachers and other P/CVE practitioners; (ii) Knowledge modelling, management and sharing to improve understanding of the role of gender in VE/CVE; and (iii) Tailor-made tools for LEAs and CSOs that will enable engagement, collaboration, efficient policy making and optimised decision making towards de-radicalisation.

Video recordings have become a major resource for legal investigations. Since no mature video investigation tools are available and trusted by LEAs, investigators still need to carry out the analysis of videos almost exclusively manually. Current practices are too resource intensive to handle the yet huge and steadily increasing volume of videos that need to be analysed after crimes and terrorist acts. The consequence is that LEAs cannot analyse all available videos because of the huge effort needed, and the extraction of first clues from videos after a terrorist attack takes more time. VICTORIA will address this need and deliver a Video Analysis Platform (VAP) that will accelerate video analysis tasks by a factor of 15 to 100 (depending on the use case), while providing very reliable results. To achieve this, VICTORIA will 1) develop a set of TRL-6 video analytics selected for their relevance in video investigation related to crimes and terrorist acts, 2) increase significantly the usability of delivered tools by involving LEAs directly in all stages of the development process, from specifications, over assessment of several VAP prototype versions, up to field trials in LEA operational conditions, 3) create an ecosystem around an open VAP concept, that will facilitate sustainable innovation and market growth for video investigation products, 4) train LEA investigators in the use of the VAP, 5) ensure that VICTORIA activities and results meet EU Legal-Ethical-Privacy rules. The VAP will have a scalable architecture based on big data technologies, feature new user interface paradigms allowing complex semantic investigation queries and 4D crime scene reconstruction, be adaptable to specific user needs, and be future proof thanks to an open analytics plug-in feature, based on standardized interfaces and open to third party suppliers. The consortium includes 4 LEAs, 6 renowned research groups, 2 SMEs and 2 industrial companies, world-leaders in security markets.

In order to address the fast-evolving challenges with respect to advanced forms of cybercrimes enabled by fully available state-of-the-art technologies (Crime-as-a-Service), there is a need for LEAs to form and apply cutting-edge collaboration frameworks that will break communication silos within the wider judicial ecosystem. These frameworks may span in numerous pillars, such as (i) regulated, privacy-preserving and easy sharing of information related to criminal activities enabling cross-border agency-to-agency collaboration in a transparent and explainable manner; (ii) joint criminal investigation further facilitated by beyond state-of-the-art tools enabling real-time collaboration and the full exploitation of distributed digital infrastructures to enhance cybercrime intelligence; (iii) exchanging different types of expertise (cybersecurity experts, forensics experts, lawyers and stakeholders from the judicial ecosystem, psychologists, social scientists) to realise cutting edge investigative approaches; and (iv) knowledge and best practices sharing with respect to trainings and cybercrime awareness. GANNDALF will set new grounds for the fight against advanced forms of cyber threats and cyber-dependent crimes; it will (i) realise cutting-edge agency-to-agency data sharing mechanisms, optimising the balance between transparency and privacy based on the needs of each LEA; (ii) deploy a modular, decision-support toolbox that will comprise not only ground-breaking technologies for collaborative investigation, prediction and identification of advanced forms of cyber threats, but also optimisation mechanisms enabling the full exploitation of these technologies; (iii) build on the above 2 offerings and deliver a customizable, collaborative crime investigation sandbox for scenarios, hypotheses analysis and crime investigation; and (iv) facilitate policy drafting, training and citizens’ engagement via innovative mechanisms that will realise the Cyber Hygiene 2.0 visiοn.