IANUS is leading the T2.4 Addressing organizational, legal and operational aspects in fully functional national firearms focal points. This task will aim at defining models, protocols and procedures for making the NFPs fully functional (i.e. addressing all challenges originating from the wide set of national/LEA bodies/agencies/institutions that are related to the operation of the NFPs and their elegant orchestration), as well as facilitating their interconnection with other NFPs (within the EU and associated countries). Furthermore, is the work package leader for WP8 Hackathons, training curricula, pilot studies and system evaluation. The aim of this work package is to validate and demonstrate the project services, by defining the scenarios for the pilot studies, implementing training curricula, planning the pilot execution and performing the demonstration and validation in real-world environments.
Abstract
Ceasefire targets the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi- isciplinary, high-tech and versatile approach for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of EU Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their struggle to detect, analyze and track cross-border illicit firearms trafficking related activities. In particular, Ceasefire efforts will concentrate on the following major driving axes:
a) The development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (ΑΙ) technologies for significantly facilitating the everyday work of the involved practitioners, and
b) The establishment of fully-operational National Focal Points (NFPs), by targeting to alleviate from current organizational, operational, cooperation, legal, cross- urisdictional, trans-border and information exchange challenges.
The former corresponds to a wide set of AI-enabled tools, including solutions for cyber patrolling, Web data gathering, on-the-spot detection of firearms, advanced Big Data analytics, cryptocurrency analysis, large-scale information fusion, visual analytics and firearms-related intelligence collection.
On the other hand, particular attention will be given towards defining models, protocols and procedures for making NFPs fully functional, complemented by activities for mapping the various legal frameworks (within different countries) and procedures (within different agencies) for harmonizing investigations, cooperation, lawful evidence collection and forensics analysis.
The development of efficient information sharing mechanisms among LEA (police, border guard, customs), judicial and forensics authorities will further reinforce the system capabilities. Moreover, the tasks of Ceasefire will complement the objectives and activities of the EU Policy Cycle (EMPACT) – Firearms (where partner MIRPN acts as Driver and partner FMI as Co-driver), while continuous guidance from the European Firearms Experts (EFE) group (where partner PSP acts as the Chair) is foreseen.