Periodic Reporting for period 2 - STARLIGHT (Sustainable Autonomy and Resilience for LEAs using AI against High priority Threats)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31
Today’s security challenges require sustainable use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). The EU-funded STARLIGHT project will increase awareness, ability, adoption, and long-term results of AI applications in European LEAs. It will improve the widespread understanding of AI across LEAs to reinforce their investigative and cybersecurity operations and support legal, ethical, and societal values. By offering opportunities to develop and exploit AI tools and solutions specifically tailored to answer LEAs’ needs, STARLIGHT will ensure LEAs can protect their own AI systems and increase LEA expertise and capacity against AI-supported crime and terrorism. The project will answer to LEAs needs with AI-based operational functionalities, high-quality datasets, an interoperable and standardised framework, and an AI hub to enhance the EU’s strategic autonomy in the field of AI for LEAs.
Challenge
The growth of AI provides security opportunities and challenges for LEAs. The challenge is to grow LEA knowledge, skills and capabilities to capitalise on AI to deliver better and more efficient solutions to counter major security threats whilst also mitigating against criminal use of the same AI technologies. LEAs should achieve this whilst also complying with legal, ethical and organisational constraints needed to safeguard the fundamental rights and freedoms of EU Citizens.
Project Objectives
• Transform the potential benefits and risks of AI in support of security into an opportunity to contribute and boost the creation of a European approach to AI for LEAs.
• Contribute to the establishment of a strong EU AI-based security industry, thus enhancing the EU’s strategic autonomy in the field of AI for LEAs.
Concept and approach
STARLIGHT will build a sustainable European AI community of relevant stakeholders applying a co-creation and co-development approach to identify and create human-centric AI solutions supporting daily activities and addressing the major threats faced by LEAs. The project endeavours to provide early access to results to end-users facilitated by a streamlined and flexible methodology enabling rapid feedback, evaluation, and uptake of results.
Expected Results
Tools: Wide range of easy to integrate, interoperable tools to support annotation for AI datasets, AI solutions to enable LEA prevention, detection and investigation capabilities (TRL7-8).
Knowledge: Improve and enrich LEAs’ knowledge and awareness of how AI can reinforce their operational and cybersecurity capabilities with a robust application of societal, legal and ethical principles.
Community: A sustainable community of AI stakeholders that will ultimately promote the creation of a European AI Hub for LEAs.
Challenge
The growth of AI provides security opportunities and challenges for LEAs. The challenge is to grow LEA knowledge, skills and capabilities to capitalise on AI to deliver better and more efficient solutions to counter major security threats whilst also mitigating against criminal use of the same AI technologies. LEAs should achieve this whilst also complying with legal, ethical and organisational constraints needed to safeguard the fundamental rights and freedoms of EU Citizens.
Project Objectives
• Transform the potential benefits and risks of AI in support of security into an opportunity to contribute and boost the creation of a European approach to AI for LEAs.
• Contribute to the establishment of a strong EU AI-based security industry, thus enhancing the EU’s strategic autonomy in the field of AI for LEAs.
Concept and approach
STARLIGHT will build a sustainable European AI community of relevant stakeholders applying a co-creation and co-development approach to identify and create human-centric AI solutions supporting daily activities and addressing the major threats faced by LEAs. The project endeavours to provide early access to results to end-users facilitated by a streamlined and flexible methodology enabling rapid feedback, evaluation, and uptake of results.
Expected Results
Tools: Wide range of easy to integrate, interoperable tools to support annotation for AI datasets, AI solutions to enable LEA prevention, detection and investigation capabilities (TRL7-8).
Knowledge: Improve and enrich LEAs’ knowledge and awareness of how AI can reinforce their operational and cybersecurity capabilities with a robust application of societal, legal and ethical principles.
Community: A sustainable community of AI stakeholders that will ultimately promote the creation of a European AI Hub for LEAs.
The first 30 months of STARLIGHT have been devoted to collect needs, analyse current LEAs’ practices, and determine the gap faced towards the adoption of AI-based solutions to refine the challenges, limitations, needs and priorities within the crime areas to be covered by the project.
6 Use Cases are addressed (broken down into 12 scenarios): Counter-terrorism, Child Sexual Exploitation, Border & External Security, Cybersecurity & Cyber threat intelligence, Addressing information overload in Serious Organised Crime (SOC) and Protection of public spaces. They are the result of a joint analysis of operational scenarios, needs and desired functionalities of the concerned stakeholders’ community.
A focus was made on identifying the main legal and ethical frameworks that are applicable to STARLIGHT, as well as societal concerns that may arise from its implementation. A comparative study was conducted on various national legal frameworks on data handling and access challenges that may have an impact on the data sharing within the STARLIGHT partners for R&D purposes.
A first action was to identify available data-oriented tools (collection, annotation, anonymisation and generation) and datasets and to assess their maturity. At M30, it represents 18 new tools and more than 130 datasets of which 23 are new. More tools are now ready to be shared with LEAs. Different data modalities (image, audio, text, video) are processed. Privacy-friendly data processing strategy is at the heart of the development. In addition, quality assessment is taken into account to identify possible biases in the distribution of the data or under-represented classes. The use of these tools was then prioritised according to their maturity and the functionality required for the selected use cases and scenarios.
To speed up the process, it was decided to run parallel co-creation and co-development cycles to tackle specific sub-scenarios. These 6-month co-development cycles are jointly led by a LEA and a technical partner. A 3rd set of CODEV cycles is currently running and a 4th one should start in Sept 2024. 4 hackathons already took place for a first evaluation of these new tools along with a first Pilot demo in an operational environment. “Lessons learned” from these events will feed the following cycles.
Understanding AI vulnerabilities is paramount and preliminary work has been done to study the latest threat intelligence strategies and to establish a basic methodology for self-assessment of risk to anticipate, predict and investigate cyber-attacks.
Finally, a repository was designed, implemented and deployed to enable the sharing of datasets and tools developed by technical partners. An orchestration framework has been developed to facilitate the integration of STARLIGHT tools into operational pipelines through a unified approach. At this stage, the repository is ready for use by LEAs and a first integrated version of STARLIGHT Framework is ready.
6 Use Cases are addressed (broken down into 12 scenarios): Counter-terrorism, Child Sexual Exploitation, Border & External Security, Cybersecurity & Cyber threat intelligence, Addressing information overload in Serious Organised Crime (SOC) and Protection of public spaces. They are the result of a joint analysis of operational scenarios, needs and desired functionalities of the concerned stakeholders’ community.
A focus was made on identifying the main legal and ethical frameworks that are applicable to STARLIGHT, as well as societal concerns that may arise from its implementation. A comparative study was conducted on various national legal frameworks on data handling and access challenges that may have an impact on the data sharing within the STARLIGHT partners for R&D purposes.
A first action was to identify available data-oriented tools (collection, annotation, anonymisation and generation) and datasets and to assess their maturity. At M30, it represents 18 new tools and more than 130 datasets of which 23 are new. More tools are now ready to be shared with LEAs. Different data modalities (image, audio, text, video) are processed. Privacy-friendly data processing strategy is at the heart of the development. In addition, quality assessment is taken into account to identify possible biases in the distribution of the data or under-represented classes. The use of these tools was then prioritised according to their maturity and the functionality required for the selected use cases and scenarios.
To speed up the process, it was decided to run parallel co-creation and co-development cycles to tackle specific sub-scenarios. These 6-month co-development cycles are jointly led by a LEA and a technical partner. A 3rd set of CODEV cycles is currently running and a 4th one should start in Sept 2024. 4 hackathons already took place for a first evaluation of these new tools along with a first Pilot demo in an operational environment. “Lessons learned” from these events will feed the following cycles.
Understanding AI vulnerabilities is paramount and preliminary work has been done to study the latest threat intelligence strategies and to establish a basic methodology for self-assessment of risk to anticipate, predict and investigate cyber-attacks.
Finally, a repository was designed, implemented and deployed to enable the sharing of datasets and tools developed by technical partners. An orchestration framework has been developed to facilitate the integration of STARLIGHT tools into operational pipelines through a unified approach. At this stage, the repository is ready for use by LEAs and a first integrated version of STARLIGHT Framework is ready.
After a successful ramp-up period, STARLIGHT achieved the building of a strong AI European Community of LEAs, researchers and industry for security. Innovative workshops took place and 19 co-development cycles, each led by a LEA/technical partner tandem, were already launched, which will help to ensure the sustainability of this community. Coverage of thematic areas in security identified by LEAs end-users with novel AI-enabled technologies is fully reached by the specification of the six use cases defined by the LEAs and technically addressed by the partners. Good synergy within the consortium has enabled the delivery of more new datasets and data generation tools than expected.
The important involvement and commitment of the LEAs in the project, since the first stages, will help the solutions’ evaluation, testing and final adoption by STARLIGHT’s end-users. At this stage, LEA partners are aware of the latest technological advances in AI, as well as the legal and regulatory framework for the use of AI in the security domain.
All STARLIGHT activities are aimed at ‘Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens’. STARLIGHT will then have a positive impact on society by disrupting criminal activities, reducing the risks that crime poses to society and addressing the concerns of EU citizens. That’s why STARLIGHT has also put a strong emphasis on the research into societal, legal and ethical considerations to ensure a consistent understanding and approach. In addition, STARLIGHT is organising multimodal awareness-raising campaigns targeted at citizens and civil society, which will allow the project to engage directly with a wider audience and demonstrate the positive impact that its results can have on society.
The important involvement and commitment of the LEAs in the project, since the first stages, will help the solutions’ evaluation, testing and final adoption by STARLIGHT’s end-users. At this stage, LEA partners are aware of the latest technological advances in AI, as well as the legal and regulatory framework for the use of AI in the security domain.
All STARLIGHT activities are aimed at ‘Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens’. STARLIGHT will then have a positive impact on society by disrupting criminal activities, reducing the risks that crime poses to society and addressing the concerns of EU citizens. That’s why STARLIGHT has also put a strong emphasis on the research into societal, legal and ethical considerations to ensure a consistent understanding and approach. In addition, STARLIGHT is organising multimodal awareness-raising campaigns targeted at citizens and civil society, which will allow the project to engage directly with a wider audience and demonstrate the positive impact that its results can have on society.