EPOOLICE

"early Pursuit against Organized crime using envirOnmental scanning, the Law and IntelligenCE systems"

 Partecipanti

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'Organized crime is becoming more diverse in its activities and methods including “greater levels of collaboration between criminal groups, greater mobility in and around the EU, a diversification of illicit activity, and a growing dependence on a dynamic infrastructure, anchored in key locations and facilitated by widespread use of the Internet” (the Director of Europol, in his foreword to the OCTA 2011 report). An important means for law enforcement in combatting such crime is strategic early warning which is heavily depending on an efficient and effective environmental scanning. Fro this, the e-POOLICE project will—in close collaboration with law enforcement partners, as well as criminological and legal experts—develop a prototype of an environmental scanning system implementing solutions applying the most promising technological advances and breakthroughs as provided by the RTD partners. The solutions will be tested an evaluated through running realistic use case scenarios that are developed by our user partners. Central to the solution is development of an environmental knowledge repository of all relevant information and knowledge, including scanned information and derived, learned or hypothesized knowledge, as well as the metadata needed for credibility and confidence assessment, traceability, and privacy protection management. For effective and efficient utilization, as well as for interoperability, the repository will apply a standard representation form for all information and knowledge. For effective and efficient scanning of the raw information sources, the project will develop an intelligent environmental radar that will utilize the knowledge repository for focusing the scanning. A key part of this process is semantic filtering for identification of data items that constitutes weak signals of emerging organized crime threats, exploiting fully the concept of crime hubs, crime indicators, and facilitating factors, as understood by our user partners.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

An EU project is developing a monitoring system for detecting organised crime activities that will also predict evolution of criminal activities. Work has involved developing system components and tools, and demonstration of the prototype.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Organised crime is expanding its methods and range of activities, while also becoming less localised and more virtual. European authorities believe that combating such crime requires a strategic monitoring and warning system.

The EU-funded 'Early pursuit against organized crime using environmental scanning, the law and intelligence systems' (http://www.epoolice.eu (EPOOLICE)) project aims to develop such a system. The prototype is expected to enable detection of organised crime and to predict its evolution. The latter requires an environmental scanning system, incorporating promising technologies developed by project partners. One example is semantic filtering, meaning to gather and consolidate information from a wide variety of sources. The project's 19 partners will work together to the end of 2015.

Team members started by developing a European network of relevant security professionals. Work also determined the needs, expectations and constraints of end users. Other preliminary work involved study of various legal and ethical implications of the proposed system.

The group refined its threat assessment methodology, supporting the environmental scanning system. Hence, the consortium developed two dynamic scenarios: trafficking of both cocaine and humans.

An initial proposal for the platform architecture has been completed and submitted to the consortium for feedback. The team further completed a preliminary description for the environmental knowledge repository (EKR), as a common and flexible model for representing environmental domain knowledge. The researchers completed an initial analysis regarding the feasibility of promoting the EKR model as standard, including the relevant options.

Tools for environmental scanning and data acquisition have been completed. The Battle Management Language was adapted and extended for use as pivot language for the English case.

The project selected certain operational software tools for information fusion and data analysis, and provided first-version fusion models. The tools are intended to automatically detect crime and suspicious anomalies. Other developed tools help with visualisation, situation assessment and sentiment analysis.

Finally, the prototype system was demonstrated.

The EPOOLICE project has to date developed, tested and demonstrated a prototype system for automated detection of crime. The system is expected to improve police effectiveness in fighting crime.