Current evidence suggests that the global fight against corruption faces serious challenges: policy decisions are not well informed, the corruption landscape is complex and enormous, while measuring corruption is so far mostly based on subjective approaches, and there is lack of appropriate technological tools to support anti-corruption. To address these challenges, FALCON is designed and dedicated to support the composition, update and management of comprehensive corruption intelligence pictures, within domains and jurisdictions of interest. This will be accomplished following a multi-actor, evidence-based, data-driven approach, building upon existing assets and prior work of consortium partners. FALCON will, first, develop and validate objective and actionable indicators (individual and composite) of corruption that can be used to inform policy decisions. Second, it will design, implement and integrate powerful data analytics tools, data pipelines and applications that support the management of the entire lifecycle of corruption intelligence pictures. This will enable comprehensive corruption risk assessment, informed policy making, and improved anticorruption law enforcement. FALCON will be piloted in four corruption domains – corruption schemes at border crossings, sanction circumvention by kleptocrats/oligarchs, public procurement fraud, conflicts of interest of politically exposed persons (PEPs) – involving law enforcement experts (police authorities and border guards) from six (6) European countries and other key actors (i.e., GovTech providers, academia, financial intermediaries, policy makers, NGOs, and civil society). FALCON’s implementation will be incremental and iterative, forming synergies between SSH and technological expertise, and will adhere to the principles of Trustworthy AI and responsible research and innovation. Lastly, FALCON has defined specific key exploitable results and performance indicators for measuring its progress and success.

Against the background of the regulation 2014/910/EU on electronic identification (eID) and trusted services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS), the FutureTrust project aims at supporting the practical implementation of the regulation in Europe and beyond. For this purpose the FutureTrust project will address the need for globally interoperable solutions through 1) basic research with respect to the foundations of trust and trustworthiness, with the aim of developing new, widely compatible trust models or improving existing models, 2) actively driving the standardisation process, and 3) providing Open Source software components and trustworthy services as a functional base for fast adoption of standards and solutions. FutureTrust will demonstrate positive business cases for the reliance on electronic signatures, sealing services, and long-term authenticity of data and documents, all with a focus on accountability, transparency and usability. For a subset of use cases, carefully selected for relevance and visibility, the FutureTrust consortium will devise real world pilot applications for the public and private sector with a focus on legally significant global electronic transactions in between EU member states and with non-EU countries. The FutureTrust project will in particular develop a comprehensive Open Source validation service as well as a scalable preservation service for electronic signatures and will provide components for the eID-based application for qualified certificates across borders, and for the trustworthy creation of remote signatures and seals in a mobile environment. Furthermore, the FutureTrust project will extend and generalize existing trust management concepts to build a “Global Trust List”, which allows to maintain trust anchors and metadata for trust services and eID related services around the globe.

Ceasefire targets the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, 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-jurisdictional, 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.

The DAREnet project is to support flood management practitioners across the EU Danube River region and from different disciplines to deepen and broaden their Research, Development and Innovation related collaboration (=RDI). DAREnet will build a multi-disciplinary community of practitioners, operating in a network of civil protection organisations, and supported by a broad range of stakeholders from policy, industry and research. Together they will build a transnational and interdisciplinary ecosystem to foster synergies, innovation and its uptake. One of the key-results of DAREnet will be a regularly updated RDI Roadmap highlighting promising innovation opportunities to cope with the main environmental and societal challenges of the region. It will provide concrete perspectives for the further development, industrialisation and uptake of innovations of highest relevance for practitioners. The Roadmap will be the result of a systematic assessment and prioritisation of promising innovations, including standardisation to foster the development of common capabilities. The RDI Roadmap will also lay the basis for concrete innovation initiatives, practitioner-driven and “bottom-up”, building a unique portfolio of joint innovation concepts for the Danube river region. To reach sustainable impact, DAREnet will draw upon synergies with the modules and facilities of the EUCPM and the regional strategies for flood prevention and risk management of the ICPDR and EUSDR. DAREnet will promote the RDI Roadmap and Portfolio to political key-stakeholders on national, regional and European level, and will also prospect institutional options to ensure the continuity of the DAREnet innovation process after project end.

The increasing number of travellerscrossing European borders is putting a mounting pressure on the everyday handling of border checks. Coping with limited resources, border control authorities have to perform a higher number of checks on travellers, while at the same time maintaining national security. Consequently, the experience of both European and third country travellersis deteriorating, due to the extra time they have to spend at the border crossing points. In that sense, flexible, automated and scalable no-gate crossing solutions may offer an effective support to border control authorities, to make border checks faster and more efficient. Nevertheless, the intensive use of these technologies bears the risk of infringing individuals’ rights and freedoms, including privacy and personal data protection. Therefore, a thorough assessment of no-gate crossing point solutions, from asocial acceptance, ethical and legalperspective, is required prior to their implementation. PERSONA (Privacy, Ethical, Regulatory, and SOcial No-gate crossing point solutions Acceptance) project’s main goal is to design and establish an integrated impact assessment method (IAM PERSONA) to appropriately evaluate the impacts of no-gate crossing point solutions, taking into account social acceptance, ethical and legal requirements, to ensure that these technologies meet the expectations of public authorities and travellers. The main outcome of the project will be a handbook, available in open access, that will provide guidance inorder to drive the innovation and deployment of future no-gate crossing point solutions by industry and border authorities, while maintaining their societal acceptance