ARIEN proposes the execution of a comprehensive workplan that thoroughly addresses the call topic aligned to the 2021-2025 EU Drugs Action Plan (DAP) achieved through a holistic innovation action that builds a real-time intelligence picture illegal drug production and trafficking incidence across the EU bolstered by AI-driven tools to understand, detect, analyse and track the entire drugs trafficking chain, its financial flows and the role of black-markets in the global darknet and their relationships with of social media. ARIEN builds on a strong platform of multi-disciplinary research, following a co-creation approach, across the criminological, societal, and legislative landscapes that will make recommendations for harmonization and drive an agenda for the development of modular solutions embedding modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and best practices for international cooperation in data-rich environments in a legally and ethically compliant manner. Aiming at improving the investigative capability of LEAs on illegal drugs production and trafficking, ARIEN will leverage on innovative AI techniques to monitor online illicit drugs markets and collecting precious information on physical drug-dealing hotspots through social media. Additional layers of analysis, supported by explainable AI (XAI) methods, will provide actionable knowledge on modus operandi and emerging threats and trends both on drugs and drug-related organized crime networks through integrations with criminal records data and detection of online activities. Moreover, ARIEN will promote effective strategies on international cooperation among EU and non-EU LEAs, Customs and Border Guards Authorities and policy makers to enhance investigative activities against criminal groups, capitalising on effective AI techniques.

Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

ORION will (a) improve coordination between border, customs and security controls through the development of novel, ground-breaking technologies to streamline processes and enhance communication between various control points; (b) optimize resource allocation for border checks in a dynamic manner, reducing wait times and hassle for travellers while maintaining high security standards; (c) enhance threat detection capabilities of border authorities in challenging operational environments such as on roll-on-roll-off ferries where vehicles and passengers are in continuous movement; (d) enforce interoperability with existing databases and tools and legacy systems used by different EU MSs; (e) improve energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of the border passing operations minimizing the waiting queues and reducing traffic congestion in these border crossings points and (f) ensure strong ethical and legal compliance of the developed technologies in order to protect travellers’ personal data. Its innovative framework will be demonstrated in 4 diverse yet complementary use cases, i.e., targeting passenger and vehicle verification during (a) embarkment and (b) disembarkment from roll-on-roll-off (Ro-Ro) ferries, (c) enhanced risk assessment and resource allocation at land border check points and (d) improved security for passengers travelling by train.

Over the past decades, Europe has experienced several terrorist attacks, proving that this threat is still real and serious, while perpetrators are finding new methods to penetrate current security measures. Although grave attacks have so far been rather infrequent, it is still a reality that EU citizens may be suddenly caught up in a terrorist incident, while at the stadium, shopping in a mall, commuting, visiting a cultural venue, or in any other public space. Besides, more terrorist attacks are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and happiness among the EU population. One in five people in the EU are indeed very worried about a terrorist attack in the next 12 months. Terrorist attacks also lower EU citizens’ trust in fellow citizens, national political, legal and police institutions. SAFE-CITIES aims to support excellence in the protection of public spaces, by delivering and demonstrating a Security and Vulnerability Assessment framework, empowered by a decision-support platform for its implementation, in 4 use-cases across 5 EU countries. This will allow for simulation of complex scenarios, crowd behaviour and attacks in any space within a realistic virtual 3D environment, enabling end-users to perform comprehensive and dynamic risk and vulnerability assessments of the site investigated, to identify potential vulnerabilities against a wide number of threats and support the full engagement and cooperation of public and private actors, including citizens, into the elaboration of strategies, to make public spaces secure while preserving their open nature. The Consortium brings together 17 partners from 9 countries (Italy, Cyprus, Netherlands, Greece, Poland, UK, Belgium, Finland, Slovenia). To effectively carry out the 32 months project, the project team includes local and regional authorities, Police authorities, First Responders organizations, RTOs and academia, CSO, security industry cluster association, and high-tech SMEs specialised in security.

Ensuring public spaces safety while preserving the freedom of citizens represents a challenge for European societies. Soft targets like malls, stadiums or big events continue to face a variety of evolving cyber and physical threats. To secure public spaces and other soft targets requires an integral security approach and new concepts involving all the security actors along with private operators. APPRAISE aims to build on the latest advances in big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and advanced visualisation to create an integral security framework that will improve both the cyber/physical security and safety of public spaces by enabling a proactive, integrated, risk-based, and resilience-oriented approach. This framework will be designed to support the secured private-public collaboration and optimise the coordination of operations involving private security staff, private operators, and law enforcement agencies. APPRAISE will offer unprecedented capabilities to predict and identify criminal and terrorist acts and enhance the operational collaboration of security actors before, during, and after an incident occurs. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Privacy observatories bringing together LEAs, private operators, technology experts, psychologists, sociologists, and society representatives will ensure full conformity of the developed tools with current EU legislation and citizens’ acceptance, preparing the ground for successful exploitation. The consortium consists of world-class research centres, industries, SMEs, LEAs of different types (national police, municipal police, elite tactical unit) as well as private security practitioners and operators, coordinated by a large industrial company with a leading position in the security market. APPRAISE will demonstrate its solutions in four complementary pilot sites: a tennis tournament in Italy, a transnational cycling tour with stages in France and Spain, an international fair in Poland, and a mall in Slovenia.