APPRAISE

Enhancing collaboration to predict and prevent terrorist acts

Objective

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.

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.

Impact

The 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.

INOV participation

INOV participates in the overall design and architecture of the APPRAISE system, contributing with tools that allow raising the situational awareness of the law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and other public authorities, as well as private security operators towards particular soft targets identified in a diversity of events.

INOV contributes with know-how to support the development of techniques to maximize information extracted from online textual content and to identify relevant networks of people with criminal intents toward soft targets.

INOV will contribute with tools to promote the crowdsensing capability by gathering relevant information from the population within the affected soft target or in its vicinity and use it to enhance the authorities’ collective intelligence, as to detect suspicious behavior, perceived anomalies and potential threats.

INOV will lead the work package to promote the public-private interoperability and collaboration services for soft target protection. INOV will develop communication tools between the operators and the crowd and will implement distributed and federated collaborative data intelligence techniques to train machine learning models in a decentralized manner preserving the privacy of the owned data for either of the involved organizations and enhancing public-private collaboration.

INOV will also participate in a subset of pilot demonstrations to validate its contributions in the APPRAISE framework.