News & Events
March 15, 2022
The CONNEXIONs project has given explicit attention during its lifespan to the legal and ethical compliance of its next-generation detection, prediction, prevention, and investigation services with all the relevant applicable national, EU and international law, research ethics standards and codes of scientific conduct, adhering in that way to the highest standards of research integrity and ethics principles, that represent the shared values upon which the EU is founded, laid down in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights with a focus on respect for human dignity, right to the physical and mental integrity of the person, and respect for privacy and protection of personal data.
February 23-24, 2022
As the CONNEXIONs project is coming to its end in February 2022, we are delighted to invite you to the CONNEXIONs Final Conference in Lisbon, Portugal on February 23-24th, 2022!
The Final event of CONNEXIONs will take place in a hybrid (physical/online) manner allowing participants to attend the event either physically at the premises of Direção Nacional da Polícia Judiciária (PJ), Lisbon, Portugal, or online and will serve as a great opportunity for interested stakeholders and end-users to get familiar with the project outcomes, including the final tools and solutions developed in CONNEXIONs.
December 16, 2021
The second workshop of the CONNEXIONs project took place jointly with its sister project CREST on December 16th, 2021. The workshop focused on the technologies developed and challenges addressed by the two projects regarding security in public spaces and large-scale public events and their respective Pilot Use Cases. Seventy people from different organisations, including Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), Universities, Research Centres, SMEs and NGOs, participated providing an ideal audience to generate interesting discussions and interactions. The workshop took place virtually since the COVID-19 restrictions were still in place. Nevertheless, the two projects demonstrated their Pilot Use Cases successfully allowing for better understanding and deeper insights to be gained.
The CONNEXIONs and CREST projects would like to invite you to their joint workshop to explore the projects as well as their Pilot Use Cases on December 16, 2021 at 13:00 CET.
Event Program
- CREST & CONNEXIONs project presentations & synergies
- Demonstrations of CONNEXIONs & CREST project results
- Panel Discussions
- Sister Project Presentations
- Invited Speakers
October 19, 2021
The first CONNEXIONs workshop focusing on ‘’Crime investigation and training through 3D reconstruction’’, an area addressed by the third Pilot Use Case of the project, took place on October 19, 2021. Fifty seven people from several different organisations, including Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), Research Centres, Universities, and Industry, participated, contributing to a fruitful discussion. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the workshop was held online; nevertheless, a full demonstration of the 3D reconstruction capabilities and the Virtual Reality (VR) application of the project was successfully presented.
October 19, 2021
The CONNEXIONs project would like to invite you in its 1st workshop of a series to explore the project as well as its tools via demonstrations and presentations. The workshop will be focused on the 3rd Pilot Use Case regarding ‘’Crime investigation and training through 3D reconstruction’’.
June 15, 2021
On June 15, 2021, the CONNEXIONs project participated to the CERIS Fighting Crime & Terrorism (FCT) workshop on 'Digital Forensics'. During the event, insightful discussions took place on issues related to Digital Forensics, starting from the intelligence gathering and investigation phases, to the secure storage and preservation of evidence (ensure the prevention of criminal attacks and high security threats). Additional important aspects were also discussed, such as best practices when developing tools of LEAs interest. Finally, legal aspects were also discussed, as for instance the ownership of the tools developed by various bodies (such as research institutions and companies).
June 7-8, 2021
The Closing Event of the LION DC project took place online on June 7-8, 2021. On the first day, the LION DC project outcomes were presented, including the definition of the online drug crime phenomena, an assessment of LEAs' needs in this domain, the newly developed investigation methods, as well as the LION DC uptake, outreach, and sustainability. Overall, the LION DC project focused mainly on developing methods and tools that further assist Law Enforcement Agencies in the fight against online drug crimes.
March 30, 2021
The Final Conference of the MAGNETO project took place online on the 30th of March 2021, where the technologies and solutions developed by MAGNETO were presented to the participants. The developed technologies and tools allow for an effective handling of large volumes of heterogeneous data, thus providing Law Enforcement Agencies with additional capabilities for crime prevention and investigation. Emphasis was also placed on ethical and legal rules and guidelines that should be respected towards the development of powerful tools and exchange of information between operators and other users.
December 07, 2020
"Access to large scale public events needs to be performedin a se-cure and efficient manner". Thus, the Romanian Protection and Guard Service (Serviciul de Protecţie şi Pază–SPP) has the objective to ensure that all security measures are considered and employed so that threats are detected in time and that any vulnerabilities are fixed before they can be exploited. CONNEXIONs assisted SPP in achieving the desired level of security with the aid of a platform that can help officers to detect threats, plan security measures, and review measures with the goal of improving human skills.
November 17-18, 2020
The Final Conference of the VICTORIA project took place online from 16 to 18 November 2020 and was an opportunity to present the outcomes of the tools developed during the VICTORIA project. These tools aim to accelerate and improve the investigations of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) following major criminal acts and terrorist attacks. During the three-day programme, the VICTORIA consortium presented the Video Analysis Platform (VAP) that was built after 3 years of intensive research by the 14 VICTORIA partners. The conference was also a chance for discussion about the future of security innovation in industry and in the European research community.
October 22, 2020
On October 22nd, 2020, CONNEXIONs performed the first pilot test for PUC2 “Human trafficking investigations and mitigation” at the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) premises. Specially trained officers from the Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit participated in a virtual demonstration of the CONNEXIONs platform and associated technologies. Investigating human trafficking can be difficult for several reasons, but primarily because individuals will be coerced into not reporting a crime due to threats to family members, language barriers or economic instability.
September 29, 2020
On 29 September 2020, the CONNEXIONs project attended CoU FCT workshop on human and societal aspects of the pandemic and beyond. The workshop focused on three areas: Child Sexual Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Infodemics.
June 16, 2020
On 16 June 2020, the CONNEXIONs project was represented by the the University of Vienna (UNIVIE) and the Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH) at the European Commission follow-up workshop on ‘research data in fighting crime and terrorism - ethical and legal clarifications’. The workshop comprised of legal and ethics experts from DG Home as well as legal and ethics project partners from 27 different EU research projects on law enforcement. Prior to the workshop, all partners were asked to send their legal and ethical questions to their coordinator, whereupon the questions from all 27 projects made up the content of the workshop.
January 30, 2020
Dr Theodora Tsikrika, participated in a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence in the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Brussels organized in thte context of SMI2G (the Security Mission Information & Innovation Group). The panel discussion was chaired by Nada Milisavljevic (DG HOME) and the following questions were discussed:
December 5, 2019
We are happy to share that our project, CONNEXIONs, was presented in a radio live show in Israel that is also broadcasted live on Facebook. Itay Koren from our partner MSIL was invited to talk about CONNEXIOΝs and how it aspires to help fighting against crime and terror.
November 12, 2019
CONNEXIONs partner UNIVIE presented the project in the context of NETLAWS one of the biggest IT law conferences in Germany on November 6th 2019.
The goal of the workshop: "The use of AI powered automated individual decision-making in the fight against crime" was to show the legal possibilities (and limitations) for implementing innovative tools based on artificial intelligence, mostly machine learning, for mission planning, surveillance and threat assessments (among other things) by law enforcement agencies.
November 5, 2019
The Innovation – Law Enforcement Agencies’ Dialogue (i-LEAD) project organised “i-LEAD Industry Days” that took place in Helsinki on 5th November 2019. Find out more about i-LEAD here. As the challenges faced by Law Enforcement exhibit significant diversity and increasing complexity, innovative solutions like Artificial Intelligence and deep learning approaches have the potential to lead to improvements in their operational capabilities.
October 29-30, 2019
In the context of MSE2019, CONNEXIONs co-organised a workshop on "Artifical Inteligence for LEAs" where a panel discussion was held. The panel was moderated by CERTH with the participation of representatives from PSNI, Europol, Greek Police, CERTH, and KEMEA.
October 29-30, 2019
The Mediterranean Security Event 2019 (MSE2019), the largest event of the year was organized by the community of Security R&D stakeholders in the European Union and took place in Crete (Greece).
This three-day event focuses on multiple security-oriented research areas that have been identified as of high priority by EU. MSE2019 embraces the need for a trust-based, multilateral and cross-sectoral cooperation among the community of Security R&D stakeholders in the European Union.
October 14, 2019
CONNEXIONs supported SATCI 2019 organized by CERTH. SACTI 2019 addresses an interdisciplinary research field involving Web Intelligence, Security Informatics, Big Data Analytics, Deep Learning/Machine Learning and Cybersecurity, and aims to investigate the deliberate misuse of technical infrastructure for subversive purposes, including (but not limited to): the spreading of extremist propaganda, antagonistic or hateful commentary; the distribution of malware; denial of service attacks; etc. Better understanding of such phenomena on the Web (including social media and the Dark Web) allows for their early detection and underpins the development of effective models for predicting cyber-enabled or cyber-dependent security threats.
July 7, 2019
The Munich Police Department published an article in the newspaper “Bayerns Polizei” (newspaper of the Bavarian police) in which MPD introduces the EU-projects in which they are currently involved in.
July 2-4, 2019
This conference was the 2nd global meeting of the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) on AI and law enforcement. The conference discussed the benefits and risk minimisation techniques required in the use of AI and law enforcement. Input was provided by a broad spectrum of stakeholders from government, the private sector, academia and civil society – all from a variety of different countries. The conference took place within the framework of the INTERPOL World 2019 – the third edition of INTERPOL’s bi-yearly event on the future of security and policing challenges.
The delegation from the University of Vienna (UNIVIE) actively participated in the dissemination of the CONNEXIONs project and provided an insight to a variety of international stakeholders of the law and more specifically data protection and privacy in law enforcement and technology within the CONNEXIONs project.
July 1, 2019
The CONNEXIONs consortium is proud to publish the 1st project newsletter.
November 11, 2018
The set of the Project dissemination material is now available at https://connexions-project.eu/documents/dissemination-material
November 10, 2018
On November 8th, 2018 the representatives of CONNEXIONs and LetsCROWD Projects met to discuss potential collaboration between the Projects. It was agreed that both teams would work together to develop a more detailed approach to future cooperation, including joint dissemination activities.
Additional information about LetsCROWD Project is available at https://letscrowd.eu/
October 15, 2018
On September 25-27 2018, the CONNEXIONs Consortium met for the formal Kick Off meeting in Israel. Thirty-five participants from all 17 Project partners and External Ethics Advisor participated in the meeting hosted by Motorola Solutions. The Project team was welcomed by the Project Officer who also presented the Commission's perspective and expectations from the consortium.