Trafficking in cultural property, in addition to its impact on world heritage, also represents a gigantic underground economy that plays on borders and participates in the financing of criminal and terrorist groups. For several years, the fight against trafficking in cultural property has been the subject of numerous actions to help the various actors involved in their daily work. All the actions undertaken aim to strengthen the protection of this heritage and require a different perspective based on the widest possible cooperation between the various professional players in the field of cultural heritage. At the national level, this desire to bring together police forces and archaeologists materialized in 2016 through the POLAR project. Following this cooperation, a first request was made to the ANR for MRSEI funding in order to bring this collaboration to a European level and to open it to a wider range of actors (museums, transnational organizations, non-governmental organizations ...). This funding enabled the setting up and success of two H2020 projects, NETCHER and PREVISION, launched in 2019. NETCHER has taken up the complex challenge of harmonizing and linking existing initiatives in a structured network supported by a digital collaborative platform. PREVISION project aimed to provide practitioners with advanced hardware support to analyze multiple metadata streams from diverse sources. The excellent results obtained in these two projects (creation of a network of 288 experts from 29 countries for NETCHER and setting up of a consortium of 28 entities from 13 countries for PREVISION), allow us to consider taking a new step forward. The SyNAAPTIC Tool proposal aims to benefit from the cross-fertilization of these expertises and to initiate a new consortium in the European landscape. Based on a very active relational framework, the mobilization of the different actors, the tools deployed, the use cases and the expressions of professional needs convinced us that a further step could be proposed. Its objective is to better understand the shortcomings of the systems and to fight with a set of tools available to European partners. The driving concept of the SyNAAPTIC Tool project would be the conjunction of a powerful image matching and identification tool such as PREVISION with a network of experts in the form of a modern intelligent networking platform (with indexing of expert skills). A major proposal for this call would be to centralize and standardize the European national databases of stolen cultural objects, but also the positive databases (museum, academic or informative Europeana type). This would allow to: · Centralize "object" data in a single format to promote interoperability. · Optimize research capacities (data and computing resources). · Provide police officers with a unique reference when discovering cultural artifacts. · Rapidly create corpuses of crisis zones, drawn up by teams of zone-experts. · Raise awareness among local populations as well as European citizens. We can meet these high expectations of European Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) by developing a specific market surveillance tool that would not only be able to regularly scan sites and catalogs, create a history of transactions but also, by programming it, analyse sales and resale cycles, distribution networks and isolate sales patterns that could lead to the identification of criminal networks and art laundering. This project should serve as a basis for future training modules for professionals involved in the fight against this traffic as well as for raising public awareness.

Identity-related frauds represent a major risk on the society safety given its serious consequences. These consequences may vary from small but very frequent frauds (telecom contracts, small credits, etc.) to transnational organized crimes and terrorist actions. An increasing number of false identity documents have been detected during the last few years, according to several official studies around the globe. The fast development of such criminal activities can be explained by an easy and public access to advanced technologies. Several studies have reported the organized nature of ID fraud activities and the progress of such black market. In order to fight against identity-related frauds, traditional investigation methods applied to identity documents (ID) rely on the presence of an expert, which significantly reduces the spread of such important verification in many administrative and commercial entities. In addition, existing ID control tools have shown several limitations, such as high false positive rates (rejection of valid documents), partial controls or nonexistent evolving capacities (new ID models, new control rules). Because of these shortcomings, automatic verification tools have not been widely used and their role has been reduced to data memorizing and simple assistance tasks. When ID frauds are detected, it is important to discover forensic links in order to identify the source of those frauds. Current investigation methods do not sufficiently address this problem and are still based on case-by-case approaches with no global analysis. However, an efficient automatic fraud pro ling system allowing to ID fraud link detection will certainly be of great benefit to anti-fraud authorities and will help to uncover many forgery worldwide networks. The core idea of IDFRAud, our proposition of an industrial research project, is to establish a virtuous circle between two processes: (1) the automatic verification of ID documents, and (2) the automatic profiling of ID frauds. The first process applies control rules on ID documents in order to check their validity, and sends detected ID frauds to the second process that analyzes them in order to discover forensic links (fraud profiling), and to enhance the ID control rules. Control rules are stored and maintained in a knowledge base in order to facilitate the system evolution. The knowledge base is also fed with existing repositories of ID document models (like Prado1) and ID frauds. In fact, adding new control rules enables more robust future ID controls, which in turn enable the detection of more ID frauds, and forensic links. The first originality of IDFRAud is to propose an automatic solution for ID verification that can handle documents issued from a large set of countries. The solution will be able to execute specific controls according to the ID model (type, country, generation, etc) thanks to a knowledge base. ID content and rules modeling is one of the main originalities of IDFRAud. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing formal description of ID documents and existing public and industrial ID knowledge bases cannot be directly used for automatic reading and verification. ID fraud automatic profiling represents a major ambition of IDFRAud. Experts from national security authorities along with academic and industrial partners will work side by side to propose the first data analysis solution dedicated to ID forensic link detection. Such intelligent solution aims at replacing the manual fastidious analysis that can hardly cope with a high-dimensional evolving false ID datasets.

iLEAnet innovation by Law Enforcement Agencies networking The goal of the present network proposal is to provide to ENSP (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Police) the means • to start building a European research and science network related to innovation in Law Enforcement • and thus to build a consortium and develop a research proposal for a Coordination and Support action that will be submitted to the call by DG HOME of the European Commission for a project in the Horizon2020 Secure Societies programme under the topic “H2020 SEC-21 GM 2016-2017 Pan European Networks of practitioners and other actors in the field of security - (a) Practitioners (end-users) in the same discipline and from across Europe”, due for submission to the European Commission on 25 August 2016. The European Union wishes to support networks of practitioners by discipline, i.e. in the same field of activity, in order to initiate and pursue research and innovation, to identify common research and innovation needs, to promote the uptake of results from already funded research activities, to leverage best practices and to shape future standardisation efforts. In particular DG HOME calls for networks of practitioners across the European Union and by discipline to jointly shape research agendas and define requirements, launch pre-commercial procurement, share best practices and drive research in their respective areas. The expected impact of these networks includes as stated by the call text: • Common understanding of innovation potential, more widely accepted understanding, expression of common innovation and standardization needs among practitioners in the same discipline... • …Synergies with already established European, national and sub-national networks of practitioners, even if these networks are for the time being only dedicated to aspects of practitioners' work unrelated to research and innovation (in general, to the coordination of their operations). It is critical for France to have a strong role in this endeavour. By taking the initiative of the iLEAnet project, ENSP will contribute to this objective. iLEAnet aims at contributing to useful, usable and used science, research and innovation addressing key challenges of LEAs (Law Enforcement Agencies). iLEAnet’s mission will be to build a LEA practitioners network centred on innovation and connected with the RDI stakeholder communities to • help emerge RDI (RDI = Research, Development and Innovation) strategies centred on LEA challenges and priorities, • render this RDI effective through structured dialogue between researchers and practitioners • and favour the uptake of results in the form of solutions, standards, best practices and policy evolutions. iLEAnet will contribute to developing a sustainable community for LEA-centred research and innovation, connecting a network of stakeholder networks in LEA challenge centred innovation, thereby inducing a ecosystem to foster synergies, innovation and its uptake. Ongoing LEA relevant national and European research projects will be able to optimise their communication and dissemination by interacting with iLEAnet. iLEAnet will also cooperate with other practitioners networks, in particular those funded under SEC-21-GM, on issues of shared interest, to optimise synergies, for mutual learning and networking opportunities across stakeholder communities. Last but not least, the iLEAnet findings and results are expected to contribute to the development of new strategies for the European security industry and hence foster the LEA specific part of the European security marketplace and strengthening European competitiveness in this important global market.

The last decades have witnessed a variety of initiatives promoted by a diverse set of actors engaged in the protection of endangered cultural heritage and in stopping illicit trade, initiatives that have tried to bring solutions, remediation, methods and approaches to tackle looting and trafficking. NETCHER seeks to address the complex challenge of harmonising and bringing together these worthy, but often disconnected initiatives by using a participative approach that will result in the establishment of a structured network (defined as a Social Platform) drawing together a broad range of players such as international bodies, umbrella organizations, national governments, researchers, public policy makers, NGOs, as well as public and private foundations. In light of the significance of these uncoordinated efforts, the Platform will take charge of the systematizing and framing of all the emerging best practices in order to enhance and capitalize on the experiences of the partnership members at an international level for building a joint action plan with shared toolkits and a research and innovation roadmap.

"<< Background >>The NETCHER project (https://netcher.eu/), started in January 2019 and concluded in March 2021, was aimed at reinforcing the fight against cultural heritage looting and trafficking, by bringing together relevant international actors (security and research communities, public and private institutions, art market specialists, policy makers), to build a sustainable social online platform. With the objective of paving the way to further initiatives, NETCHER issued a set of recommendations, addressing all the different communities of stakeholders. They underline the importance to create reliable, comprehensive and accessible information, on which the efficiency of education and awareness processes relies.The Final Forum of NETCHER, organised on 1-2 March 2021, has also underlined the need to extend its activities to a wider audience, also involving the educational sector and the general public, since the dimension of the challenge requires a wider intervention, involving all the citizens from their early age. In the final round table, representatives of five Directorates-General of the European Commission - also including DG EAC for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture - were requested to comment the recommendations issued by the NETCHER project and highlighted the policy issues from different perspectives. They all agreed that a strong interaction among the educational sector and the key actors involved in looting and trafficking is necessary, with a strong focus on cultural institutions. Archaeological sites and museums are mostly concerned, but any kind of cultural institutions are touched by this severe issue.The present PITCHER project is the first action started to put into practice this strategy, trying to respond to the needs (often not clearly identified yet) of the educational sectors in front of this key problem. Its solution is not involving only a few numbers of police forces, researchers and cultural bodies, but needs the collaboration of all the citizens, starting from the youngsters. It is crucial to make them aware that cultural and archaeological heritage is essential to our understanding of mankind, our history, who we are and where we come from. Taking away the study of these objects from specialists is the same as irreversibly destroying a part of our past.<< Objectives >>The project intends to propose a new model for addressing young people about the problem of fighting the looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, focusing on school teachers, in order to raise their awareness and enhance their professional development in this field. This will be done by: - enhancing schools with new models for increasing the knowledge of students, as well as use educational scheme for acquiring the critical thinking necessary to play an effective role in tackling this problem, as a young citizen and as an adult; - creating prototypes of innovative tools based on STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking; - using the educational potential present in the European cultural institutions (archeological sites, museums, libraries, etc.) to support teachers in the development of lessons and workshops aiming at demonstrating the intercultural dimension of the problem. It is a matter of fact that ""creativity"", for born digital youngsters, is strictly associated to the use of IT devices, that are their main tool for communicating and exchanging feelings, emotions and passions. This is why the presence of the ""makers"", the digital artists, can support this action, since they well know the potential of the use of technology and can support the development of educational resources to stimulate creativity. It is important to remember that the word ""poet"" comes from the Greek verb ""poieo - ποιέω"", that means ""to make"". This approach well justify the organization of training events where the partners are working together with creative artists and cultural institutions for jointly designing new educational tools based also on gamification and escape games, enhanced reality, and real-time interaction with the students. In this way, the project will enable all the students to express their culture and ideas, while providing opportunities for the acquisition of necessary skills and know-how to participate in wider cultural developments. The general objective of the proposal consists then of the design and test of a set of open educational resources, to be made available also online, focusing on improving the educators’ capacity in preparing new learning experiences to support the fight against looting and illicit trafficking of cultural goods, thanks to the rich repositories of digital cultural heritage accessible through the web.<< Implementation >>The activities are organised according to the following main phases: Phase 1: COMMON FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY (M1-12) During this phase partners will build a common framework and work methodology by analysing existing good practices and initiatives. This includes the identification of case studies and interviews with stakeholders and key actors. Focus group can be organised in the partner countries with relevant local stakeholders to share and validate the results of this phase. The existing potential available in European digital collections of cultural heritage will be analyzed, to identify and select the most effective materials to be made available to the European schools. Phase 2: DEVELOPMENT & TESTING (M13-M32) During this second phase, partners will develop the Open Educational Resources (OERs). The courses and the related educational materials will be prepared in English in the first version, and they will be translated (if necessary) and tested in the partner countries. Teachers and students, but also citizens, will be involved in the pilot action. Thanks to the feedback received from the participants to the pilot actions, the OERs will be revised and fine-tuned. Evaluation activities will be boosted in this phase to support the testing with the collection and analysis of adequate data. Phase 3: MODELING AND RECOMMENDATION (M29-M36) Based on the results of the test phase, the training materials will be revised and improved and enriched with additional materials. During this phase, partners will work together in order to create a model of intervention and a series of guidelines and recommendations for drafting a document paving the way to a mass use of the training model and resources at local, regional or even national level. Also, the project foresees 6 transnational partners meetings, and 6 multiplier events.<< Results >>PITCHER will develop scenarios that advance the concept of 'open schooling' by building clusters of stakeholders around a creative and critical engagement of youngsters in the fight against looting and trafficking of cultural goods, also involving – as a secondary target group – museum educators, memory institutions and other organisations involved in informal and non-formal educational places, such as community centers, services for youth, young offenders. Through its results: 1: Methods to include a creative and critical thinking approach in education, supporting the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural goods; 2: Design and test of the Open Educational Resources; 3: Guidelines and recommendations for mass use of the training model and resources,PITCHER will create a set of OERs able to help EU teachers in implementing creative ways to involve young generation in this dramatic problem with the help of the educational potential of European cultural institutions. Themes covered in the materials and tools will also include themes of intercultural reflection, values; and identity(ies); dialogue and dialogical relationships; EU values and critical thinking."