Periodic Reporting for period 1 - APPRAISE (fAcilitating Public & Private secuRity operAtors to mitigate terrorIsm Scenarios against soft targEts)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-09-01 do 2023-02-28
Cyber and physical threats are becoming increasingly complex. As a result, public safety measures need to stay one step ahead of the fast-paced changes. The EU-funded APPRAISE project will develop an integrated threat intelligence solution designed for protecting the augmented cities environment. It will perform a continuous and effective monitoring of online sources and physical sensors to identify potential threats and improve strategies for protection of soft targets (such as shopping malls and stadiums), while preserving the freedom of citizens. Building on the latest advances in big data analysis, AI and advanced visualisation, the project will offer unprecedented capabilities to predict and identify criminal and terrorist acts and enhance the private-public collaboration of security actors.
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.
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.
During the first period covered by this report, technical and end-user partners of the consortium have tightly collaborated to define the list of end user needs delineating the boundaries of the APPRAISE system. This work has enabled the end users to precisely describe the evaluation scenarios for each of the four pilots. These scenario-driven approach guided the technical partners designing the innovative APPRAISE framework, formalized in the specification deliverable written during this period. Stemming from these specifications, with the pilot scenarios as a target, the development teams have researched, developed, and integrated a first version of the APPRAISE system which will be for the first time fully evaluated during a large-scale pilot in Slovenia, in the beginning of the second period. This pilot is a national exercise for the Slovenian Ministry of Interior involving close to one hundred trainees and trainers outside of the consortium, including public and private organizations. As a result, the first iteration of the APPRAISE framework developed and deployed is a scalable, flexible, and efficient Data Intelligence platform, which includes, but not limited to, technologies ranging from social network analysis, security camera algorithmic surveillance with drones, counter UAV systems, all information gathered into novel digital twin-based hypervision system enabling to fuse the data and to make it intelligible to ease decision making. All of these technologies, deployed to physically and cyber protect public spaces, have been documented 42 deliverables.
APPRAISE features beyond the SoTA tools for security practitioners to improve their operational capabilities performing (i) online content analysis, (ii) soft target risk assessment, (iii) actionable threat intelligence extraction, and (iii) smart and effective data visualization in a digital-twin based hypervision system with (iv) AI-based decision support capabilities. The online content analysis module acquires data (textual, visual and audio) from both surface web and darknet sources and perform a multi-modal analysis to extract indicators of imminent attacks in specific soft targets. A social network analysis enables to identify networks and specific individuals orchestrating either the attack or propaganda campaigns. The output of the threat detection modules and the online content analysis module, together with smart city data, are visualized on a digital twin-based hypervision and operation management system that will enable intuitive real-time situational awareness. Furthermore, the available data will be analysed using AI-based Big-Data tools for geospatial analysis, threat intelligence and predictive analytics, enabling advanced Decision Support Services.
The definition of the evaluation scenarios has involved public and private organization even some being cross-boundary. The feedback revealed the necessity of such tools, even though complex in their technologies, but also in its deployment and adoption. The APPRAISE project is still on-going and the first evaluation will take place just after the end of the first period. While all the results cannot be yet fully evaluated, the APPRAISE technologies have been designed in a scenario-driven and user-centric approach to contribute to the impacts of the topic SU-FCT-03 Information and data stream management to fight against (cyber)crime and terrorism and to the broader objectives of the Work Programme, i.e. protection of citizens, society and economy as well as of prosperity, stability and well-being.
The definition of the evaluation scenarios has involved public and private organization even some being cross-boundary. The feedback revealed the necessity of such tools, even though complex in their technologies, but also in its deployment and adoption. The APPRAISE project is still on-going and the first evaluation will take place just after the end of the first period. While all the results cannot be yet fully evaluated, the APPRAISE technologies have been designed in a scenario-driven and user-centric approach to contribute to the impacts of the topic SU-FCT-03 Information and data stream management to fight against (cyber)crime and terrorism and to the broader objectives of the Work Programme, i.e. protection of citizens, society and economy as well as of prosperity, stability and well-being.