Periodic Report Summary 1 - HOMER (SEC-2012.1.3.2- Homemade explosives (HMEs) and recipes characterisation- Capability)
Project Context and Objectives:
Project synopsis
The HOMER Project (Homemade Explosives and Recipes characterisations project) has at its heart a very simple premise – to keep people safe in communities across Europe from the threat of HME and devices containing HME.
The project is co-ordinated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, itself the focus of a long term domestic terrorist campaign. In Northern Ireland, the threat posed to the safety and security of the policing service remains significant and to that effect, community safety and stability can also be threatened. During the past decade, security agencies and law enforcement bodies across Europe and indeed across the globe have seen an increase in the use of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) many of which have Home Made Explosives as a central component. Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) have also seen an increase in relevant information being made available online which allows groups and individuals to develop skills in both the making of IEDs and the development of techniques to make HMEs.
The HOMER project has a number of key components – to research HME recipes, test and evaluate the findings and then make those findings available to LEAs, security agencies and other relevant end users through a secure Knowledge Management Platform (KMP).
There are a number of key benefits of access to sustainable HME content through knowledge management for end users, LEAs, security and defence agencies and manufacturers of fertilisers and chemicals. The aim of the work undertaken in period one is to begin the work to fulfil the objectives of the HOMER project, according to the project plan. The activity summary below indicates which work packages within the project have worked to meet the project objectives in period one.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
1) Expanding the knowledge of European bodies – by mapping and analysing the sources of information that instruct on how to prepare HMEs, on the required raw materials and precursors, on their technical characteristics and on the possibilities of their detection using existing technologies.
This has been achieved in WP2, 3 and 4 through the work of T2.1 T2.2 T3.1 T3.2 and T3.3. In addition T4.1 has provided further detail in the form of a user handbook.
2) Mitigating the threat presented by HME – the expansion and enhancement of knowledge on HMEs within the framework of the project will directly serve security and law enforcement agencies in their quest to prevent the use of HMEs to perpetrate attacks. The prime project result provides these benefits and will include data mining and means of disseminating information on the characteristics of the threat and the technical knowledge. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2, WP3 and WP5 and will continue to be achieved in period two.
3) Required to prevent the use of HMEs - to detect and classify them in instances when they are used.
This objective has been partly achieved in WP2 and WP3.
4) Deliver sustainable HME content for use – results of study held on a knowledge management platform, securely accessible to security and law enforcement agencies – including police officers while on the street, faced with a suspicious item, as well as manufacturers of fertilisers and precursors. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2, WP3 and WP5.
5) Draft a standard on HME vocabulary and definitions – suitable for Europe and an integral part of our dissemination strategy. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2 and WP3 and will continue in period two in WP4.
6) Promote with work of the project – timely and efficiently disseminate the project results; implement feasibility study including cost and market analysis for effective exploitation of the project results. This objective has been partly achieved in WP7 through work in WP2 and WP3 and will continue in period two.
Project Results:
Summary of activities during the first period
The HOMER project began in November 2013 with a kick off meeting in Belfast, UK. In accordance with the DoW, work in WP1 (lead PSNI), WP2 (lead TCD), WP3 (lead CERTH), WP5 (lead CERTH) and WP7 (lead PSNI) began in Months 1 and 2.
Shortly after the project began, the Consortium agreed to start work earlier in WP6, developing the testing strategy and test cases to ensure alignment of the WP project work and support the WP interdependencies and transfer of information.
Further to that, following advice from the Security Review Group and External Advisory Group, the Consortium made a decision to include an additional language in WP3 development, to ensure the project demonstrated flexibility and responsiveness to the current operating environment. This work resulted in a significant change to the DoW and following consultation with partners, effort and budget was reallocated to cover this additional work. This was supported by budget remaining following the withdrawal of partner ISDEFE.
The financial progress of the project has been closely managed by the co-ordinating organisation (PSNI) and the periodic report contains detail of the current financial position. Significant work was undertaken by the PSNI to mitigate following the withdrawal of ISDEFE from the consortium in November 2013, just before the Project kick off.
During the first eighteen months of its lifetime, HOMER achieved considerable progress with respect to all of its objectives. With respect to the project objectives, considerable research in WP2 and 3 has provided the foundations to expand the knowledge of European bodies in the area of HME (objective 1). The data structure provided in D2.1 provides the building blocks of knowledge, while the research in T2.2 T3.1 T3.2 and T3.3 provides literature, empirical and content information on HME. In WP3 also, significant work to meet project objectives 1, 3 and 4 has been undertaken with the development of specific tools to mine the web for new information on HMEs. These tools have been developed with a multilingual capacity and in the first project period have been demonstrated in English. In the second period they will be demonstrated in Arabic.
During this period also, in WP5 the user requirements have been specified in partnership with WP5 lead and end user partners, based on which the HOMER technical specifications have been set and the platform architecture has been designed. This work contributes significantly towards the achievement of project objective 4. This platform design will serve as a basis for the work in the Project in the second period, particularly WP6 which will test the Knowledge Management Platform (KMP) and the results from WP2, 3 and 4. In addition, in the context of each individual objective, further targeted actions have been performed. This work will deliver the sustainable HME content for use. In WP6, the designed use cases and test strategy to test the tools of the HOMER project in the real world environment have been set.
In relation to objective 6, the HOMER consortium has been active in dissemination with a number of opportunities delivered; these include a number of presentations to a range of targeted audiences including the Fertilisers Europe Safety Seminar, the global Explosive Inspectors Conference and to Bulgarian Parliament Delegates, Deputy Ministry of Defence and subject matter experts. News articles and written papers to workshops have also been delivered and published. These include;
Focussed crawling of environmental web resources: A pilot study on the combination of multimedia evidence’, 1st International Workshop on Environmental Multimedia Retrieval, Glasgow, UK (CERTH) and ITI-CERTH paper to and participation in TRECVID 2014 (Proceedings of TRECVID 2014). TRECVID, Orlando, Florida, USA (Participation in conference not undertaken as part of HOMER).The opportunity to disseminate the work has been limited as the significant number of deliverables fall into Period Two of the project.
Currently, significant work is underway in all Work Packages, with technical work closely aligned in the interdependencies table created through the Technical Management Committee.
Overall, the project progresses as planned, with strong collaborations and partnership working among the consortium. It was the aim to have a common goal and understanding of the project, the objectives of the first 18 months have been achieved successfully and corrective action taken to address any challenges and deviations.
Participant no. Participant organisation name Part. short name Country
1 (CO) Police Service of Northern Ireland PSNI UK
2 Tamar Israeli Advanced Quarrying TMR Israel
3 Trinity College, Dublin TCD Ireland
4 Bundesanstalt Fuer Materialforschung Und-Pruefung BAM Germany
6 Defense Institute BDI Bulgaria
7 The Queens University of Belfast QUB UK
8 Centre for Research and Technology Hellas CERTH Greece
9 Kentro Erevnon Notioanatolikis Evropis Astiki Mi Kerdoskopiki Etaireia SEERC Greece
10 Yara SA YARA Belgium
Potential Impact:
Expected final results and potential impact
The expected final results of HOMER is a platform, data mining and crawling tools and substantiated information that will support end users, (LEA’s and security and defence agencies) in their fight against the use of HME in criminal and terrorist activity.
The project will develop tools for online crawling and mining and a prototype platform which will enable maintainable substantiated HME knowledge that has been mapped, researched, collected, studied, filtered, analysed and tested to be made available in a secure and innovative way to end users.
The project will;
1) Deliver sustainable HME content for use – results of study held on a knowledge management platform, securely accessible to security and law enforcement agencies – including police officers while on the street faced with a suspicious item as well as manufacturers of fertilisers and precursors.
2) Draft a standard on HME vocabulary and definitions – suitable for Europe and an integral part of our dissemination strategy.
3) Expanding the knowledge of European bodies – by mapping and analysing the sources of information that instruct on how to prepare HMEs, on the required raw materials and precursors, on their technical characteristics and on the possibilities of their detection using existing technologies.
4) Work to mitigate the threat of HME – through the framework of the project, the expansion and enhancement of knowledge on HMEs will directly serve security and law enforcement agencies in their quest to prevent the use of HMEs to perpetrate attacks.
The data mining and crawling tools will be testing in two cycles, demonstrating its use in English and then in Arabic. These two cycles allows the tools to demonstrate their multilingual capabilities. This should allow the tools to work in any number of languages, ensuring they are truly usable across the European Union.
The potential impact offers LEAs and other end users an innovative and secure way to access updated HME information, allowing operational decisions to be informed on a regular basis. The developed mining tools offer significant opportunities for end users to mine for other relevant security information if the tools can be configured to do so.
It is important for the HOMER project to recognise the ethical and legal challenges of developing data mining tools. The tools will have the capability to crawl and mine for information based on text and visuals but this will be undertaken based on the ethical, legal and human rights framework for each jurisdiction. The perceived development of such tools can have an impact on trust and privacy of the individual and such issues should be considered and protected. Each jurisdiction will be responsible for ensuring the crawling and mining tools are deployed within their legal and ethical frameworks.
In its final stage of development, HOMER is expected to have a significant impact from several perspectives. First, the platform will actively support end users across a range of security disciplines (LEA, security, defence), increasing their knowledge and supporting operational decision making.
Second, the end users in the end user domain will benefit from the tools and technologies developed in HOMER, in order to improve their existing information databases. Third, the development of such tools will boost the competitiveness specifically in the media monitoring domain and in general in Europe, since the mobility of SMEs will be facilitated. Finally, the social impact of HOMER will be the production of cross-validated news articles and the presentation of results to end users to demonstrate how the tools and platforms can keep people safe.
List of Websites:
www.homer-project.eu
Project synopsis
The HOMER Project (Homemade Explosives and Recipes characterisations project) has at its heart a very simple premise – to keep people safe in communities across Europe from the threat of HME and devices containing HME.
The project is co-ordinated by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, itself the focus of a long term domestic terrorist campaign. In Northern Ireland, the threat posed to the safety and security of the policing service remains significant and to that effect, community safety and stability can also be threatened. During the past decade, security agencies and law enforcement bodies across Europe and indeed across the globe have seen an increase in the use of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) many of which have Home Made Explosives as a central component. Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) have also seen an increase in relevant information being made available online which allows groups and individuals to develop skills in both the making of IEDs and the development of techniques to make HMEs.
The HOMER project has a number of key components – to research HME recipes, test and evaluate the findings and then make those findings available to LEAs, security agencies and other relevant end users through a secure Knowledge Management Platform (KMP).
There are a number of key benefits of access to sustainable HME content through knowledge management for end users, LEAs, security and defence agencies and manufacturers of fertilisers and chemicals. The aim of the work undertaken in period one is to begin the work to fulfil the objectives of the HOMER project, according to the project plan. The activity summary below indicates which work packages within the project have worked to meet the project objectives in period one.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
1) Expanding the knowledge of European bodies – by mapping and analysing the sources of information that instruct on how to prepare HMEs, on the required raw materials and precursors, on their technical characteristics and on the possibilities of their detection using existing technologies.
This has been achieved in WP2, 3 and 4 through the work of T2.1 T2.2 T3.1 T3.2 and T3.3. In addition T4.1 has provided further detail in the form of a user handbook.
2) Mitigating the threat presented by HME – the expansion and enhancement of knowledge on HMEs within the framework of the project will directly serve security and law enforcement agencies in their quest to prevent the use of HMEs to perpetrate attacks. The prime project result provides these benefits and will include data mining and means of disseminating information on the characteristics of the threat and the technical knowledge. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2, WP3 and WP5 and will continue to be achieved in period two.
3) Required to prevent the use of HMEs - to detect and classify them in instances when they are used.
This objective has been partly achieved in WP2 and WP3.
4) Deliver sustainable HME content for use – results of study held on a knowledge management platform, securely accessible to security and law enforcement agencies – including police officers while on the street, faced with a suspicious item, as well as manufacturers of fertilisers and precursors. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2, WP3 and WP5.
5) Draft a standard on HME vocabulary and definitions – suitable for Europe and an integral part of our dissemination strategy. This objective has been partly achieved in WP2 and WP3 and will continue in period two in WP4.
6) Promote with work of the project – timely and efficiently disseminate the project results; implement feasibility study including cost and market analysis for effective exploitation of the project results. This objective has been partly achieved in WP7 through work in WP2 and WP3 and will continue in period two.
Project Results:
Summary of activities during the first period
The HOMER project began in November 2013 with a kick off meeting in Belfast, UK. In accordance with the DoW, work in WP1 (lead PSNI), WP2 (lead TCD), WP3 (lead CERTH), WP5 (lead CERTH) and WP7 (lead PSNI) began in Months 1 and 2.
Shortly after the project began, the Consortium agreed to start work earlier in WP6, developing the testing strategy and test cases to ensure alignment of the WP project work and support the WP interdependencies and transfer of information.
Further to that, following advice from the Security Review Group and External Advisory Group, the Consortium made a decision to include an additional language in WP3 development, to ensure the project demonstrated flexibility and responsiveness to the current operating environment. This work resulted in a significant change to the DoW and following consultation with partners, effort and budget was reallocated to cover this additional work. This was supported by budget remaining following the withdrawal of partner ISDEFE.
The financial progress of the project has been closely managed by the co-ordinating organisation (PSNI) and the periodic report contains detail of the current financial position. Significant work was undertaken by the PSNI to mitigate following the withdrawal of ISDEFE from the consortium in November 2013, just before the Project kick off.
During the first eighteen months of its lifetime, HOMER achieved considerable progress with respect to all of its objectives. With respect to the project objectives, considerable research in WP2 and 3 has provided the foundations to expand the knowledge of European bodies in the area of HME (objective 1). The data structure provided in D2.1 provides the building blocks of knowledge, while the research in T2.2 T3.1 T3.2 and T3.3 provides literature, empirical and content information on HME. In WP3 also, significant work to meet project objectives 1, 3 and 4 has been undertaken with the development of specific tools to mine the web for new information on HMEs. These tools have been developed with a multilingual capacity and in the first project period have been demonstrated in English. In the second period they will be demonstrated in Arabic.
During this period also, in WP5 the user requirements have been specified in partnership with WP5 lead and end user partners, based on which the HOMER technical specifications have been set and the platform architecture has been designed. This work contributes significantly towards the achievement of project objective 4. This platform design will serve as a basis for the work in the Project in the second period, particularly WP6 which will test the Knowledge Management Platform (KMP) and the results from WP2, 3 and 4. In addition, in the context of each individual objective, further targeted actions have been performed. This work will deliver the sustainable HME content for use. In WP6, the designed use cases and test strategy to test the tools of the HOMER project in the real world environment have been set.
In relation to objective 6, the HOMER consortium has been active in dissemination with a number of opportunities delivered; these include a number of presentations to a range of targeted audiences including the Fertilisers Europe Safety Seminar, the global Explosive Inspectors Conference and to Bulgarian Parliament Delegates, Deputy Ministry of Defence and subject matter experts. News articles and written papers to workshops have also been delivered and published. These include;
Focussed crawling of environmental web resources: A pilot study on the combination of multimedia evidence’, 1st International Workshop on Environmental Multimedia Retrieval, Glasgow, UK (CERTH) and ITI-CERTH paper to and participation in TRECVID 2014 (Proceedings of TRECVID 2014). TRECVID, Orlando, Florida, USA (Participation in conference not undertaken as part of HOMER).The opportunity to disseminate the work has been limited as the significant number of deliverables fall into Period Two of the project.
Currently, significant work is underway in all Work Packages, with technical work closely aligned in the interdependencies table created through the Technical Management Committee.
Overall, the project progresses as planned, with strong collaborations and partnership working among the consortium. It was the aim to have a common goal and understanding of the project, the objectives of the first 18 months have been achieved successfully and corrective action taken to address any challenges and deviations.
Participant no. Participant organisation name Part. short name Country
1 (CO) Police Service of Northern Ireland PSNI UK
2 Tamar Israeli Advanced Quarrying TMR Israel
3 Trinity College, Dublin TCD Ireland
4 Bundesanstalt Fuer Materialforschung Und-Pruefung BAM Germany
6 Defense Institute BDI Bulgaria
7 The Queens University of Belfast QUB UK
8 Centre for Research and Technology Hellas CERTH Greece
9 Kentro Erevnon Notioanatolikis Evropis Astiki Mi Kerdoskopiki Etaireia SEERC Greece
10 Yara SA YARA Belgium
Potential Impact:
Expected final results and potential impact
The expected final results of HOMER is a platform, data mining and crawling tools and substantiated information that will support end users, (LEA’s and security and defence agencies) in their fight against the use of HME in criminal and terrorist activity.
The project will develop tools for online crawling and mining and a prototype platform which will enable maintainable substantiated HME knowledge that has been mapped, researched, collected, studied, filtered, analysed and tested to be made available in a secure and innovative way to end users.
The project will;
1) Deliver sustainable HME content for use – results of study held on a knowledge management platform, securely accessible to security and law enforcement agencies – including police officers while on the street faced with a suspicious item as well as manufacturers of fertilisers and precursors.
2) Draft a standard on HME vocabulary and definitions – suitable for Europe and an integral part of our dissemination strategy.
3) Expanding the knowledge of European bodies – by mapping and analysing the sources of information that instruct on how to prepare HMEs, on the required raw materials and precursors, on their technical characteristics and on the possibilities of their detection using existing technologies.
4) Work to mitigate the threat of HME – through the framework of the project, the expansion and enhancement of knowledge on HMEs will directly serve security and law enforcement agencies in their quest to prevent the use of HMEs to perpetrate attacks.
The data mining and crawling tools will be testing in two cycles, demonstrating its use in English and then in Arabic. These two cycles allows the tools to demonstrate their multilingual capabilities. This should allow the tools to work in any number of languages, ensuring they are truly usable across the European Union.
The potential impact offers LEAs and other end users an innovative and secure way to access updated HME information, allowing operational decisions to be informed on a regular basis. The developed mining tools offer significant opportunities for end users to mine for other relevant security information if the tools can be configured to do so.
It is important for the HOMER project to recognise the ethical and legal challenges of developing data mining tools. The tools will have the capability to crawl and mine for information based on text and visuals but this will be undertaken based on the ethical, legal and human rights framework for each jurisdiction. The perceived development of such tools can have an impact on trust and privacy of the individual and such issues should be considered and protected. Each jurisdiction will be responsible for ensuring the crawling and mining tools are deployed within their legal and ethical frameworks.
In its final stage of development, HOMER is expected to have a significant impact from several perspectives. First, the platform will actively support end users across a range of security disciplines (LEA, security, defence), increasing their knowledge and supporting operational decision making.
Second, the end users in the end user domain will benefit from the tools and technologies developed in HOMER, in order to improve their existing information databases. Third, the development of such tools will boost the competitiveness specifically in the media monitoring domain and in general in Europe, since the mobility of SMEs will be facilitated. Finally, the social impact of HOMER will be the production of cross-validated news articles and the presentation of results to end users to demonstrate how the tools and platforms can keep people safe.
List of Websites:
www.homer-project.eu