What is the i-LEAD Research Day?
To start 2021, i-LEAD is organising a Research Day. This one-day event complements the Industry Day that took place in October 2020.
Research Day is organised in association with the Europol Innovation Lab. During the one-day session, i-LEAD provides a space for research initiatives, researchers and Industry to deliver presentations directly to security practitioners and procurement specialists from European law enforcement agencies (LEAs).
The topics stem from the workshops facilitated by the UK Home Office during the i-LEAD project.
During the gatherings, i-LEAD identified several reoccurring requirements that popped up, regardless of the workshop domain. They were often worded differently depending on the subject, but the root of the requirement spawned from the same requests:
- To speed up processes / operations / investigations using artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning – supported by workflow automation.
- To decrypt the communications between criminals, allowing officers to gain awareness of the interactions and intentions of organized crime.
- New techniques and approaches to gain access to encrypted data stored on hardware devices.
The goal of the first Research Day is to assess opportunities for improving activities by integrating AI and decryption technologies into investigations and operations. Consequently, Researchers, Academics and Businesses are invited to explain how their work could enhance policing activities related to any, or all of the following domains:
- Drug Crime
- Financial Investigations & Crypto-currencies
- Public Order
- Crime Scene Recording & Documentation
- Digital Forensics
AI, machine learning and decryption are truly horizontal matters, and we encourage any related entities to submit their ideas on how concepts and prototypes (not ready made solutions – TRL 6 or below ) that are on the horizon could be exploited to improve policing capabilities in Europe. The goal of the meeting is to foster cooperation, supporting ongoing dialogue between LEAs and the research market.
As a part of the Research Day the ‘Round Table session’ will be organised. The topic for this part is: Emerging Technology & Big Data – Ensuring Innovation While Preserving Fundamental Rights and Preventing Algorithmic Biases.
We encourage you to participate in the i-LEAD Research Day, which is free of charge. The registration form for participants can be found here.
Agenda
How the event will work
The Research projects, technology concepts and ideas will present their work directly to LEAs and members of Industry. An opportunity for dialogue and dedicated Q&A will accompany the session with the goal of covering the most pertinent topics.
What Areas interest i-LEAD?
Although crime areas differ in practicality, many of the technologies that could help support Law Enforcement and improve the fight against criminals are cross-sectional. This is especially true regarding Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and Decryption Technologies. Thus, concepts and solutions that supplement other technologies or can integrate with tools are a key focus area in 2021.
The possibilities for presentations are not limited. The project team welcomes any suggestions connected to AI and Decryption. The following list highlights topics that have been raised during workshops, but it is by no means exhaustive.
AI/Machine Learning
- Speeding up video and photo analysis
- Completing Semantic analysis of content (written, video, audio)
- Predictive situational analysis
- Automated contextualisation analysis for extracted data
- Automated programme searches, to speed up manual searches of online content and/or extracted data
- Securing AI technologies
- Explainable and/or court proof AI
- AI for mobile technology/field operations
Decryption
- Decrypting application data on mobile phones
- Extracting encrypted data from physical data storage on digital devices
- Password Cracking
- Decrypting data associated with financial transactions (identifiers)
- Decrypting short message application data
- Post-quantum cryptography
Presenters
Website: locard.eu
NLP has been exploited for years in various domains to facilitate the extraction of knowledge from human language. Nevertheless, the main effort is on processing large amounts of data. However, this is not always the case, as in many occasions we exchange short messages. Therefore, processing short chunks of texts is a challenge in many domains. In this talk we will present some of the LOCARD findings using NLP in the context of detecting deviant online behaviour ranging from the detection of selling credentials to grooming.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: ait.ac.at
The need for cryptoasset analysis tools is certainly increasing in law enforcement. At the moment, one can choose between commercial services or low-level open-source tools providing programmatic access. The goal is to present the design and implementation of another option: the GraphSense Cryptoasset Analytics Platform, which is open source can be used for interactive investigations of monetary flows and, more importantly, for executing advanced analytics tasks using a standard data science tool stack. By providing a growing set of open-source components, GraphSense could ultimately become a useful instrument for law enforcement agencies.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
GraphSense website: graphsense.info
Website: magneto-h2020.eu
MAGNETO’s Semantic Engine offers a bundle of tools that allows different types of data (interrogation reports, structured data, audio files, videos, other documents) to be processed and semantically integrated into a knowledge base. Using this engine, LEAs can ingest and combine together these data, as well as reason upon them using an inventory of logic or probabilistic rules so as to discover and reveal hidden relationships as new knowledge.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: forensicinstitute.nl
Organised crime needs to store information; they cannot have it all in their head. Encrypted USB sticks are a common way to ‘safely’ store information on transactions, money, etc. There are no commercial solutions for cracking these types of USB sticks. In the past NFI has successfully attacked some make/model sticks but saw the need for a universal tool to support the attacking of these USB sticks. The result is the universal NAND Flash emulator.
Website: mklab.iti.gr
The referred solution involves the acquisition and processing of actual video streams from aerial vehicles during the execution of pre-identified missions. Therefore, the component processes video streams from drones in real-time operations and extracts cognitive information in alignment with the corresponding applications. The service can be executed on existing infrastructures as the majority of such systems integrates relevant capabilities.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: darleneproject.eu
Ecosystem: Improving Situational Awareness via Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality
The DARLENE ecosystem, developed in the context of an EC research project, aims to improve LEAs’ efficiency and enhance officers’ Situational Awareness. DARLENE incorporates novel AI techniques for computer vision tasks such as activity recognition and pose estimation while also building an Augmented Reality (AR) framework for visualization of the inferred results via dynamic content adaptation according to each individual officer’s stress level and the context of a security incident. To minimize any delay and achieve real-time performance, DARLENE adopts a multi-layered architecture along the computing continuum to distribute AI analysis requests and seamlessly orchestrate edge, fog and cloud computation resources via a 5G communication infrastructure. In this presentation, we will attempt to provide the context of the DARLENE ecosystem, explaining its key functionalities for AI & AR in security and safety while demonstrating some preliminary results.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: prevision-h2020.eu
Prediction and Visual Intelligence for Security Information
PREVISION Platform – an open and future-proof platform for providing cutting-edge practical support to LEAs in their fight against terrorism, organized crime and cybercrime, which represent three major cross-border security challenges that are often interlinked. PREVISION integrates its developments into a common platform that will be made available for thorough validation and evaluation by real end-users in operational conditions.
The application covers:
- Extreme-scale Heterogeneous Data Streams Processing modules: Crawling tools; Traffic, Telecom and Financial Data Sources; etc
- Machine Learning and Automated Cognitive Capabilities modules: Semantic Information Processing; Smart Fusion and Incomplete Data Handling AI-based Evidence Discovery; etc
- Applications for Enhanced Operational and Situational Awareness: Operational and Situational Awareness
- Tools; Fight against Illicit Trafficking; etc
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: anita-project.eu
The ultimate goal of ANITA project is to design and develop automated tools to analyse and reconstruct the illegal trafficking chain of drugs, counterfeit medicines, New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) and firearms trafficking activities related to terrorism. ANITA will combine:
- Innovative technologies to analyse crypto-currency networks and financial transactions
- Advanced Big Data Analysis and Analytics tools to extract clues and evidence from vast amount of heterogeneous contents
- Automated information fusion and knowledge reasoning capabilities
- User-oriented intelligence applications to enable users in identifying patterns for spatial, temporal and causal correlations among illegal trafficking events, entities and activities and support decision-making processes.
- Growth in the popularity of malicious programs using super-user rights, primarily advertising Trojans
- Distribution of malware via Google Play and advertising services
- The emergence of new ways to bypass Android protection mechanisms
- Growth in the volume of mobile ransomware
- Active development of mobile banking Trojans
All the above functionalities will be strengthened by an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of the online illegal trafficking phenomenon and of the online resources with respect to social, ethical, legal and privacy issues of concern.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Website: roxanne-euproject.org
The purpose of this demo is to showcase the operational advantages in terms of automated evidence processing, AI-based analysis and intuitive representation of the present version of the ROXANNE platform. This preliminary version integrates a set of technologies employing Machine Learning techniques and models for Language Identification, Gender detection, Age Identification, Automatic Speech Recognition, Topic detection, Named-Entity Recognition and Network analysis.
The demo will be based on a synthetic dataset that involves three drug dealing cases at the same time, where the investigator uploads wiretapped recordings of suspects’ telephone conversations into ROXANNE platform in order to identify whether and how these suspects are connected.
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Round-Table Participants
Website: formobile-project.eu
Speakers: Legal & Ethical Leads – Denitsa Kozhuharova, (LIF) & Pieter Gryffroy (Timelex)
Website: kuleuven.be
Speakers: Stefano Fantin, Doctoral Researcher in Law and Public Policy & Katherine Quezada Tavárez, Researcher
Website: 8bellsresearch.com
Speaker: Nikolaos Sgouros, Director of Development / AI & Software Solutions
Website: constellaintelligence.com
Speaker: Lindsay Whyte, UK Regional Director
Lindsay Whyte is you point-of-contact. He is ex-Intelligence Corps (UK Ministry of Defence) and works with partners to automate OSINT investigations and enhance data coverage in future, to ensure police forces future proof their OSINT coverage, save time and unmask criminals and state actor threats. To receive more information or schedule a quick chat, contact lindsay.whyte@constellaintelligence.com.
Website: europol.europa.eu
Speaker: Ruth Linden, Policy Advisor in the Europol Innovation Lab
The presentation from the i-LEAD Research Day 2021 can be found by clicking here.
Associated Partner
Contact Details
www.i-lead.eu
steven.ormston@ppbw.pl
Twitter – @i_LEAD_Project
The Polish Platform for Homeland Security organises the i-LEAD Research Day; if you have any questions or aspects you would like to discuss, please reach out to steven.ormston@ppbw.pl.