SAFE-CITIES
The SAFE-CITIES project aims to help protect public spaces by providing a security and vulnerability assessment framework supported by an interactive platform.
The platform will enable the simulation of complex scenarios, taking into account the behavior of the crowd and various types of attacks in any space in a realistic 3D virtual environment, allowing for comprehensive and dynamic risk and vulnerability assessments of the tested locations. The project is based on the full participation and cooperation of public and private entities, including citizens, in developing a strategy to ensure the safety of public space while maintaining its open character.
SAFE-CITIES is based on the assessment and use of already existing technologies as well as their development in the context of changing forms of threats, drawing on the experience of practitioners dealing with public spaces protection in European countries, and as a result providing a tool that will facilitate risk assessment and ways to prevent its increase through the application of, among other things, appropriate urban solutions.
IMPRESS
The IMPRESS project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in June 2023 and will last two years.
The project aims at improving the protection of stations and trains by developing security training and awareness programmes for all stakeholders in rail stations and on trains. The scope of the training includes security culture in general (with a wide range of significant threats for several European rail operators) and CBRNe threats specifically, which represent a more challenging scenario. The focus will be on the ‘immediate responders’ from the railway environment who are most likely to be the first to prevent or react to a security incident when it occurs on railway premises. This target group of end-users includes the railway staff (e.g., non-security staff at stations and onboard trains, security staff) and stakeholders at stations (e.g., shops, business area) or in trains (e.g., catering, cleaning).
DISRUPT
The DISRUPT project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in April 2023 and will last two years.
It is aiming to improve investigations, prosecutions and the judicial response based on digital evidence in the area of trafficking of children.. The main objectives include developing an integrated approach encompassing improved digital capabilities of law enforcement and expertise; enhancing coordination of law enforcement authorities; building new and strengthened partnerships of public bodies and private companies in order to harness innovation and expertise in digital evidence and technology
PROTONE
The PROTONE project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in March 2023 and will last two years.
It is based on cooperation between different faith-based organizations from three Abrahamic religions, with the aim of overcoming the differences between their respective security cultures and improving their ability to address security threats through a coordinated response. The project adopts a holistic and comprehensive approach that requires taking into account all the different aspects related to the buildings and communities to be protected, including a pluralistic definition of threats that should be extended to non-violent and non-terrorist acts as well, including verbal assaults, vandalism, burglary and arson. At the methodological level, the project is mainly based on qualitative and ethnographic research, which was considered the most appropriate to map the sources of threats in the vicinity of places of worship and to prepare an adequate response from religious communities.
PARTES
The PARTES project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in March 2023 and will last two years.
It proposes a comprehensive prevention model for the protection of places of worship that is evidence-based, inclusive and participatory. The project will make a significant contribution to the improvement of the overall protection of public spaces through the creation and enhancement of places of worship’s preventive and security concepts. This will be achieved by taking the threat landscape, the online dimension and pre-attack or preventive phases and measures into account, as well as by newly established communication structures with authorities.
SHRINEs
The SHRINEs project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in February 2023 and will last two years.
It brings together a network of religious organizations, law enforcement agencies (LEAs), academic institutions and public authorities active in EU Member States. It is the first interfaith community in Europe dedicated to safety and security managers and experts for the protection of places of worship.
The main objectives of the project include raising awareness on the most emergent safety and security risks faced by places of worship, strengthening the security of places of worship, fostering inter-faith dialogue, identifying and exploiting novel technological solutions for security of places of worship.
SHIELD
The SHIELD project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in January 2022 and will end in December 2023.
It aims at protecting places of worship from the risks of violent extremism. Implementing risk factors’ analysis, SHIELD is to enhance security postures at places of worship through improving the coordination, cooperation, and communication between law enforcement agencies, public authorities, faith leadership and congregations. The combination of the SHIELD protective and risk factors’ analysis brings together stakeholders and target groups to develop new measures to ensure the safeguard of these places and the resilience of believers with different faiths.
PROSPERES
The ProSPeReS project, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in June 2021 and will end in November 2023.
It is aimed at increasing the level of protection in places of worship with keeping the balance between security measures and preservation of the open nature of religious sites. This will be achieved by forming a cooperation between faith-based leaders, public services and security experts, the places risk evaluation, raising public awareness, as well as developing and validating a comprehensive protection system. The inherent part of the project is organizing a series of train-the-trainer training and large-scale exercises in religious sites with engagement of public security services: police, fire-fighters and medical.
SASCE
The SASCE, funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund, was launched in April 2021 and ended in June 2023.
It was a multi-layered project with the aim to dramatically increase security in and around places of worship, as well as within and between Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish communities. Building and expanding on the good practices recommended by the Commission for the protection of public spaces, but also relying on the knowledge and expertise of well-organized communities and security groups, the consortium developed concrete tools, which, associated with training, wider communications and the use of technology solutions, were instrumental in achieving a high-level of protection of EU citizens, in full cooperation with authorities throughout the EU.
AIDA
The AIDA project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, was launched in September 2020 and ended in February 2023.
It focused on cybercrime and terrorism by approaching specific issues and challenges related to law enforcement agencies (LEAs) investigation and intelligence using pioneering machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. The proposed solution aims to deliver a descriptive and predictive data analytics platform and related tools to prevent, detect, analyze, and combat criminal activities.
SPIRIT
The SPIRIT project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, was launched in August 2018 and ended in October 2021.
The project took a novel approach in the development, testing, training and evaluation of a new scalable privacy preserving intelligence analysis for resolving identities system prototype. It delivered a set of tools for the acquisition, analysis, modeling and visualization of multimodal, multilingual and multimedia data. The result is a platform that allows to create social graphs of heterogeneous named-entity relationships and to perform social and criminal network analysis on those graphs. The SPIRIT platform was developed within privacy by design and privacy through design processes assisting LEAs in unraveling the hitherto complex world of identity resolution
HECTOR
The HECTOR project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, was launched in March 2015 and ended in July 2018.
The main objective of the project was to bridge basic algorithmic approaches with hardware-level security implementations. It required integrating secure cryptographic primitives such as random number generators (RNGs) and physically unclonable functions (PUFs), together with physical attack countermeasures. HECTOR studied, designed and implemented RNGs and PUFs with demonstrable entropy guarantees and quality metrics. This included on-the-fly entropy testing and physical attacks evaluations, which enabled more secure systems and easier certification.