Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA (hence ENG) is the coordinator of the AIDA project and leads the activities focused on integration for the development and implementation of the AIDA system. ENG guides also the definition of system specification and architecture, and will take part in the demonstration of the system in operational environments. Finally, ENG will also define the AIDA exploitation strategy to pave the way for AIDA’s Go-to-Market.
Engineering Group is a global player in the digital transformation sector, with a complete offer of business integration, application and infrastructure outsourcing, innovative solutions and strategic consultancy.
The Group manages IT initiatives in over 20 countries with projects in Digital Finance, Smart Government, Manufacturing & Retail, Smart Energy & Utilities, Digital Citizenship, Digital Telco & Multimedia, supported by cross-business unit centers of competence and by the Research and Innovation Department which has the dual role of promoting research on software at an international level and transferring innovation to the production cycle of the business structures.
The Group operates in the outsourcing and cloud computing market via an integrated network of data centers equipped with infrastructure aligned to the best technological, quality and security standards.
Europol will facilitate the coordination of the activities involving LEAs in the project. To this end, it will lead WP10, will be responsible of use cases and scenarios and standard formats and taxonomies (WP2), the preparation of sanitized datasets for research purposes (WP5), analysis of financial networks (WP7), arrangement of sandbox environment (WP8) and pilots execution and evaluation (WP9).
Europol is the European Union’s law enforcement agency. Headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands, Europol supports the 27 EU Member States in their fight against terrorism, cybercrime and other serious and organised forms of crime. With over 1 400 staff members, Europol serves as a centre for law enforcement cooperation, analytical expertise and criminal intelligence.
CERTH will be the Scientific and Technical Coordinator of AIDA. Being a key research partner with expertise in Artificial Intelligence, CERTH will be the leader of WP6 “Big Data processing and advanced enrichment” and a core partner of WP7 “AI-supported actionable intelligence and knowledge generation”. Finally, CERTH will be leading the Quality Management and will contribute to the system integration (WP8).
The Information Technologies Institute (ITI) was founded in 1998, as a non-profit organization, under the auspices of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of Greece, with its head office located in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since 2000, it is a founding member of the Centre of Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), also supervised by the Greek Secretariat of Research and Technology. CERTH/ITI is currently one of the leading Institutions of Greece and is conducting basic and applied research in established and emerging areas in the fields of Informatics, Telematics and Telecommunications. It is one of the largest IT research centres in Northern Greece with well-organized facilities, highly qualified personnel and a reputation as a top-level research IT institute in Greece and abroad, with long experience in numerous European and national Research and Development (R&D) projects. CERTH/ITI is participating in AIDA with two research labs, the Visual Computing Lab (VCL) and the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory (MKLab).
CENTRIC leads WP4 (Societal Aspects) that investigates citizens' perceptions of and reactions to advanced LEA technologies. CENTRIC further leads on the discovery of relevant content on Surface, Deep and Dark web, development of tools for discovery and monitoring and assessment of emerging trends in cybercrime and terrorism. CENTRIC supports the projects on ethics, data management and evaluation of AIDA solutions.
CENTRIC (Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) is a multidisciplinary, security-focused research centre located at Sheffield Hallam University. The strategic aim of CENTRIC is to develop and facilitate the collaboration between four key stakeholders in the security domain: Citizens, Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), Industry and Academia. Consequently, CENTRIC is able to provide solutions to some of Europe’s most pressing contemporary security challenges through the delivery of ground-breaking research, advanced technological capabilities, professional expertise, and training. This enables CENTRIC to offer innovative solutions informed by the operational reality of modern day law enforcement.
Vicomtech is the leader of work package 2 (Framework requirements and specifications), task 2.3 (System specification), task 5.5 (Datasets hygienization to support EU security research), and tasks 6.5 (Video classification and video description). From a research and technical perspective, Vicomtech will focus its efforts in AIDA in visual computing work.
Vicomtech is an applied research institute located in San Sebastian (Spain). It is a private non-profit foundation. Among its 140 employees, more than 95 are researchers. The role of Vicomtech in the market is to supply society with technology by transfer of primary research to industry. This is done through collaborative R&D projects. Vicomtech’s main research lines lay in the fields of computer vision, computer graphics and interaction; technologies which Vicomtech applies in multiple sectors. Vicomtech achieved the HR Excellence in Research recognition of the European Commission, which proves its compromise with open, transparent and merit-based recruitment of researchers (OTM-R: Open, Transparent and Merit-based RECRUITMENT OF Researchers). This acknowledgement adds up to ISO9001_2015 and UNE166002:2014.
PLURIBUS ONE is the leader of WP7 – AI-supported actionable intelligence and knowledge generation and in particular will be responsible for the identification of points of interest and analysis of criminal groups. In addition, it will contribute to tasks related to the evaluation of source code and binaries and content extraction from online sources, as well as those related to system architecture, integration, pilots and dissemination and exploitation activities.
PLURIBUS ONE is a research-intensive company based in Italy, focused on providing innovative solutions and services for cybersecurity. The company was born as a spin-out of the Pattern Recognition and Applications Lab of the University of Cagliari. While PLURIBUS ONE has been recently established (August 2015), its staff has more than 20 years of experience in world-class research, and in providing solutions based on pattern-recognition and machine-learning technologies for real-world applications. In 2017 PLURIBUS ONE brought to the market Pluribus One Web Application Security, an advanced and AI-powered solution for the protection of the Web Services. A second product, which first release was finalized in July 2019, is named Pluribus One Internet Security and offers protection against cyber-attacks like malware and phishing leveraging the DNS traffic generated by the endpoints.
ITI will bring its experience to develop and delivery Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence capabilities for automated reasoning and knowledge mining mechanisms for detecting and recognize patterns in behaviours and data coming from different sources. ITI's knowledge will be especially interesting in the visualization of temporal and geospatial information and graph analytics for the development of an interactive dashboard.
Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI) is a Spanish private Research & Technology organization located in Valencia, Spain. ITI is a Competence Centre in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), established in 1994 by a joint initiative of the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE), and a group of companies from the ICT sector. ITI Research and Innovation activity is developed by a team of more than 190 technologists (researchers and technicians), and is focused on six main digital enablers around the Data Cycle, primarily Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, but also other key digital enabling technologies like Cyber Physical Systems, IoT, Cloud and High Performance Computing Platforms or Statistics Optimization.
For the AIDA Project, BD will contribute to source code and binary analysis in WP6, data ingestion from IoT sources in WP5, early detection of criminal activities and identification of points of interest in WP7. BD will participate to system specification and architecture (WP2), integration (WP8), demonstration in operational environments (WP9) and dissemination and exploitation activities (WP10).
Bucharest-headquartered Bitdefender (BD) is a Romanian large enterprise and a trusted IT security provider since 2001. With a global security delivery infrastructure, visionary solutions, and a wealth of awards, Bitdefender works with government organisations, large enterprises, SMEs and private individuals across more than 150 countries, protecting half a billion users.
From IoT to datacentres, from endpoints to hybrid infrastructures, Bitdefender plays a transformational role in how security is best consumed, deployed, and managed. Being one of the most innovative IT security software vendors in the world today, the company strives to deliver products and services, focused on efficacy, performance, ease of use and interoperability.
Expert System will lead all aspects related to the analysis of text (Task 6.3) in the languages and sources of interest; it will support identification and prediction of criminal activities in WP7 and will contribute to system specification and architecture (WP2), integration (WP8), demonstration in simulated operational environments (WP9) and dissemination and exploitation activities (WP10).
Expert System is a Semantic Intelligence market leader developing advanced solutions for companies and government. Expert System has made “intelligent” knowledge management of unstructured information its core business. COGITO, developed by a team of professional linguists, programmers and language engineers, is Expert System’s linguistic platform that understands the semantic aspects of language and provides a conceptual representation of the meanings.
Expert System Iberia (ESI) is the Spanish company of the group Expert System, headquartered in Barcelona and Madrid, includes innovators and researchers with a large background in semantic technologies, data management and intelligent information access and their application to different business and scientific sectors.
Our key role is to provide other partners with translations of text data using current state-of-the-art neural machine translation techniques to facilitate further analysis by the partners. Since neural machine translation is sensitive to domain change between training data and data translated by the final system, we will prepare domain-adapted systems specific to the project.
Lingea is an IT company which has been developing language tools and collecting linguistic data for over 20 years. We have expertise in terms of data processing and application development. Our technologies combine our own language data, know-how and software to work with one of the world's most complicated systems, the human language. Language is something you encounter every day in both written and spoken form. Our technologies will help you get a grasp on languages, translate, search and use them more efficiently.
Our language publications are currently being sold via our subsidiaries in 7 countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia and we can proudly say that we are the biggest language book publisher in the Czech Republic.
VoiceInteraction (hence VOI) leads the activities focused on multi-lingual speech recognition technology of audio and video files, voice biometrics, audio analysis for speaker clustering and recognition, and acoustic event detection. VOI will be also actively involved in the project dissemination by presenting the projects’ technological achievements in major speech and multimedia processing conferences and exhibitions.
VoiceInteraction is a technology-based SME operating on the global marketplace with multi-lingual, real-time solutions using speech processing technologies. VoiceInteraction's areas of expertise include audio processing, audio events detection, speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech understanding, natural language processing and dialogue systems.
VoiceInteraction operates in Europe, South America, and USA with solutions tailored to different domains, including Government, Education & Culture, Broadcast & Media organizations, and large corporations. The company is supported by the Research and Development Department that is actively involved in the development of state-of-the-art speech processing technology and in the transfer of innovative research prototypes to commercial solutions ready to use.
UCD’s DigitalFIRE will contribute to the development of educational content by leveraging its 17 years of cybercrime investigation training experience and extensive technical know how of the latest educational technology. UCD will lead two tasks on data acquisition from IoT systems and privileged sources.
University College Dublin is the largest university in Ireland and supports the full range of academic disciplines. UCD has about 23,000 students, including almost 4,000 international students from over 100 countries. For more than 17 years, the UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics has equipped teams of international cybercrime experts with the skills, knowledge and tools to pre-empt and protect against increasingly serious cybercrime attacks. This has been achieved through the creation of education and training programmes, the development of forensic software tools, and research into existing and future threats. Over 1000 LE officers and corporate investigators from all over the globe have signed up to graduate programmes in Computer Forensics at CSI. UCD’s Digital Forensic Investigation Research Laboratory is a research laboratory in CSI that focuses on the development of new technology for forensics and investigative training.
Within AIDA the Cybercrime Research Institute will primarily focus on ethical and legal aspects of the research as well the proposed solution. This is ensure that the research and the solution are reflecting highest ethical standards and are compliant with regional and national legislation.
The Cybercrime Research Institute (CRI) is a think-tank and research institution. It was founded in 2009. The purpose of the institute is to provide state of the art research and consultancy service related to strategic, legal, policy and leadership matters to private and public sector. Since the foundation CRI has been operating on all continents and provided services to numerous governments and Fortune 500 companies. The headquarter with one of the largest libraries in the field of Cybercrime and Cybersecurity literature is located in Cologne, Germany. CRI is committed to providing highest standards when it comes to research and consultancy. To insure these standards CRI is working with a network of some of the most respected experts in their fields.
KEMEA’s role in AIDA project is to lead the “Demonstration in simulated operational environment” (WP9), in particular for the definition of pilots’ scenarios and their planning and preparation. KEMEA will be also involved in the use cases and will lead the user requirements’ elicitation (WP2) and dissemination and exploitation activities (WP10).
KEMEA has been established as the Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection think tank on security policies. KEMEA is a scientific, consulting and research agency, whose purpose is to conduct theoretical and applied research and to produce studies, particularly at a strategic level, on issues concerning security policies. KEMEA is in involved in a) R&D in the context of National and EU projects in close cooperation with LEAs, working under the auspices of the Ministry b) training of practitioners in new systems and technologies and c) the certification of practitioners in private security professions at national level. One of the main objectives of KEMEA is to bring together all LEAs, enabling them to collaborate, interconnecting them with research institutions and the industry from around Europe.
As an end-user (LEA) for the project, PSNI will contribute to project tasks related to use cases/scenario definition and requirements identification (WP2), hands-on trials, testing, validation and demonstrations (WP9), as well as exploitation and dissemination (WP10).
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) is the Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) with responsibility for the delivery of policing in Northern Ireland.
The PSNI was established in 2001 as part of the recommendations of the Good Friday Agreement and is the successor to Royal Ulster Constabulary GC. PSNI headquarters is based in Belfast, with 6730 police officers and 2090 support staff.
The central role of the PSNI is to help build a safe, confident and peaceful Northern Ireland. Working in partnership, policing prevents crime, detects offenders and protects the most vulnerable in society. We are committed to enhancing community safety and building public confidence in policing.
The PSNI strives to be at the forefront of research and innovation regarding policing and security, ensuring as an organisation we are continually learning, adapting and improving
Guardia Civil as part of final users (LEAs) is involved in:
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Testing the pilots plan reviewing the feedback from each pilot phase, monitoring pilots results and ensuring consistency across reporting approaches from trials.
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Raising of awareness and dissemination of the results of the project internally and externally, both in forums and in specialized law enforcement agencies.
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To Report dissemination and outreach activities.
The Guardia Civil is an armed institution of military nature, whose point of reference and origin is the Spanish people. The Guardia Civil “raison d’être” is the protection of citizens, their property and assets, and its core mission consists in ensuring the full exercise of rights and freedoms. The Guardia Civil missions include administrative police, protection of the Spanish economic interests, public order, criminal investigation, intelligence services, under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior and in certain cases of the Ministry of Defense. In order to carry out all these functions, Guardia Civil has around 2000 installations, with 80,000 officers who are deployed all over the national territory and territorial waters.
As an end-user (LEA) for the project, the Hellenic Police will contribute to project tasks related to use cases/scenario definition and requirements identification (WP2), hands-on trials, testing, validation and demonstrations (WP9), as well as exploitation and dissemination (WP10).
The Hellenic Police is subordinate to the Ministry of Citizen Protection and operates as a Law Enforcement Agency according to the Law nr. 4249/2014 in order to:
- Ensure peace and order as well as citizens` unhindered social development, a mission that includes general policing duties and traffic safety;
- Prevent and interdict crime as well as to protect the state and the democratic form of government within the framework of constitutional order, a mission that also includes the implementation of public and state security policy;
- Protect external borders.
The Hellenic Police comprises both central and regional services and its Headquarters is the supreme authority over these services. For this reason, it schedules, directs, oversees and monitors the activities of its services, and it ensures the necessary conditions for the exercise of its authority.
As an end-user (LEA) for the project, IGPR will contribute to project tasks related to use cases/scenario definition, requirements identification, hands-on trials, testing, validation and demonstrations, as well as exploitation and dissemination
Inspectoratul General al Politiei Romane (EN: General Inspectorate of Romanian Police) is the central unit of Romanian Police with general territorial competences. It leads guides and controls all the police units with the country, investigates serious crimes related to organized crime groups, cybercrimes, money laundering, financial or bank fraud or other crimes which are under the competence of the General Prosecutor’s Office.
Thus, IGPR has under its command over 55.000 police officers. In order to fulfill its role of preventing and fighting crime and other anti-social events, Romanian Police has developed specialized structures that support the investigation. In this respect, according to the competences provided by the law, some of the directorates which function under IGPR have specific tasks in fighting cybercrime, financing of terrorism, serious organized crime, conducting special operations, intelligence analysis, special intervention and IT&C support and data analysis, including Big Data
As an end-user for the project, NHTCU will contribute to project tasks related to use cases/scenario definition and requirements identification, hands-on trials, testing, validation and demonstrations, as well as exploitation and dissemination.
The Dutch national police force consists of 10 Regional Units, the Central Unit and the Police Services Centre. The five-member Force Command has its own support section (Commissioner’s Staff).
The National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) of the Dutch National Police is working on technological standardisation within the whole organisation and with Law Enforcement Agencies from several countries. NHTCU has a data driven approach in fighting cyber crime, together with other LEAs.
As a National LEA, Polícia Judiciária has strict competences of investigation over serious and organized crime while developing and promoting preventive, detection and investigative action. PJ will ensure end-user participation and vision. As an end user PJ will work on requirements definition, execution cooperation and validation on results.
Polícia Judiciária (PJ) Portuguese Criminal Police is the Portuguese higher criminal police body, hierarchically organized under the aegis of the Ministry of Justice.
PJ’s mission consists on assisting the judicial and prosecuting authorities with investigations, by developing and promoting preventive, detection and investigative actions.
As a criminal investigation police force, PJ has reserved competence for the investigation of serious and organized crime in general.
Participation in work packages 1, 2, 5, 9, 10:
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EPBG participates in the project by presenting, analysing and suggesting requirements, existing best practices and needs for analysis, detection and prevention of crimes and analyzing emerging situations.
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EPBG presents relevant use case and can give practical knowledge in activities related to fighting crime and prevention activities.
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EPBG will also take part in testing, evaluation and possible dissemination of project outcomes and results.
Estonian Police and Border Guard Board (Politsei- ja Piirivalveamet, EPBG) is a police authority. The police is an institution of executive power within the area of government of the Ministry of the Interior and the main functions thereof are protection of public order, organization of matters of border management, detection and elimination of marine pollution, organization of search and rescue operations at sea, and organization of matters in the area of citizenship and migration.
EPBG is developing cooperation with other national authorities, local government units, public organizations, citizens and their communities, and other countries and international law enforcement bodies. There are approximately 5000 people working in the name of internal security of Estonia in Police and Border Guard Board. Thus, it is one of the biggest state agencies in Estonia. The territorial area of responsibility covers the whole territory of Estonia. EPBG has practical knowledge in various activities related to internal security, community policing, fighting serious crime, border management and migration and citizenship issues. EPBG has good practical experience in integration of different components of internal security and public safety.