Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

ORION will (a) improve coordination between border, customs and security controls through the development of novel, ground-breaking technologies to streamline processes and enhance communication between various control points; (b) optimize resource allocation for border checks in a dynamic manner, reducing wait times and hassle for travellers while maintaining high security standards; (c) enhance threat detection capabilities of border authorities in challenging operational environments such as on roll-on-roll-off ferries where vehicles and passengers are in continuous movement; (d) enforce interoperability with existing databases and tools and legacy systems used by different EU MSs; (e) improve energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of the border passing operations minimizing the waiting queues and reducing traffic congestion in these border crossings points and (f) ensure strong ethical and legal compliance of the developed technologies in order to protect travellers’ personal data. Its innovative framework will be demonstrated in 4 diverse yet complementary use cases, i.e., targeting passenger and vehicle verification during (a) embarkment and (b) disembarkment from roll-on-roll-off (Ro-Ro) ferries, (c) enhanced risk assessment and resource allocation at land border check points and (d) improved security for passengers travelling by train.

In Europe and other Western societies, research findings and policy documents have unearthed an overabundance of recommendations on domestic violence. In theory, we know very well how we should prevent, detect and mitigate domestic violence. However in daily practice this is often not taken into account. Also, there is less research on the factors that escalate family and partner conflict into high impact domestic violence. IMPRODOVA will focus on the police side of the gap between what we know and what we do, but will also include the aspect of police co-operation with other first responders. Why, in practical police work, is domestic violence often regarded as a low priority problem? Why is the reporting rate by victims low? What are the human factors that define effective response and best practice police work in networks of other first line responders, e.g. health practitioners, schools, and youth services? Police frontline responder interviews expanded by fieldwork observation data will be weighed against intermediate and top police leadership expertise collected in the partner LEA's. The influence of human factor variables in frontline operations will be investigated, and the parameters of risk assessment, also of medical practitioners, will be established and compared. Training and study materials with a special focus on scenario-based learning modules will be designed to address the barriers to better domestic violence policing. IMPRODOVA will reach out across the boundaries of first and other relevant responders by disseminating the field research findings to other professionals and representatives of domestic violence prevention and mitigation. A special focus will be laid on the media presentation of domestic violence, since media play an important role how HIDV and its victims are perceived in public. IMPROVODA will produce a set of sustainable products for training and inter-professional communication to reduce DV prevalence and re-victimization.

Ensuring public spaces safety while preserving the freedom of citizens represents a challenge for European societies. Soft targets like malls, stadiums or big events continue to face a variety of evolving cyber and physical threats. To secure public spaces and other soft targets requires an integral security approach and new concepts involving all the security actors along with private operators. APPRAISE aims to build on the latest advances in big data analysis, artificial intelligence, and advanced visualisation to create an integral security framework that will improve both the cyber/physical security and safety of public spaces by enabling a proactive, integrated, risk-based, and resilience-oriented approach. This framework will be designed to support the secured private-public collaboration and optimise the coordination of operations involving private security staff, private operators, and law enforcement agencies. APPRAISE will offer unprecedented capabilities to predict and identify criminal and terrorist acts and enhance the operational collaboration of security actors before, during, and after an incident occurs. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Privacy observatories bringing together LEAs, private operators, technology experts, psychologists, sociologists, and society representatives will ensure full conformity of the developed tools with current EU legislation and citizens’ acceptance, preparing the ground for successful exploitation. The consortium consists of world-class research centres, industries, SMEs, LEAs of different types (national police, municipal police, elite tactical unit) as well as private security practitioners and operators, coordinated by a large industrial company with a leading position in the security market. APPRAISE will demonstrate its solutions in four complementary pilot sites: a tennis tournament in Italy, a transnational cycling tour with stages in France and Spain, an international fair in Poland, and a mall in Slovenia.