For many years, cultural property in general and archaeological artefacts in particular have become currencies for small-scale trafficking to terrorist financing or money laundering means for mafia organizations. The challenge of the NOSE project is to be able to implement a technical solution to protect archaeological objects as well as those involved in the preservation of these properties: from the archaeological excavation team to the museum curator. It is therefore a question of proposing a robust, durable and easily usable solution on an excavation site. In this context, a solution based on inks containing nanometric markers is envisaged. This ink will offer different levels of protection and will be easily usable by end users, i.e. archaeologists, museum curators and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs).

Sexual violence against minors is a serious phenomenon, constantly on the increase, and France and Europe have made the fight against these crimes a priority as part of their overall security policy (Directive 2011/93/EU of the European Parliament of 13/12/2011). Police officers generally work in a profession with a high potential for trauma and psychological distress. This is a population with a suicide rate 36% higher than the general population (Senate report 2019). Some specialised police officers and scientific experts from the national forensic science service are on the front line in the daily fight against offences related to sexual violence against minors, which generate specific secondary traumatic stress. Few studies have been carried out on the subject, particularly in France where, to our knowledge, no research has been done on this topic. The STEPS project is innovative in this sense. It aims to evaluate, in the context of their professional activity, the impact of the exposure of specialised police officers and their scientific experts to secondary traumatic stress generated by these criminal acts, and to highlight the factors favouring resilience processes. The aim of the research is to develop a support methodology for accompanying psychologists as well as for managers, in order to detect and effectively strengthen the professional capacities of specialised police forces. This research, resulting from a previous collaboration, integrates a strong partnership between university researchers, police psychologists, specialised police officers and experts from the National Forensic Service.

The ARCO project focuses on the search and rescue of drowning victims in urban rivers. In a context of global warming and urban growth, the risk of drowning is expected to increase. Unfortunately, despite professional and well-trained rescuers, the proportion of rescued victims remains unsatisfactory, as urban rivers are harsh environments with strong currents, often turbid and cold water, many obstacles on the bed and very large search areas. ARCO proposes to significantly improve these rescue operations; firstly, by defining the locations, times and factors conducive to drowning in cities in order to build effective prevention and surveillance strategies; secondly, by estimating the location probability distribution of the victim at any given time in order to narrow down the search area; and thirdly, by improving underwater search techniques. Lyon, France, with the Rhône and Saône Rivers, is its main case study but ARCO will produce general results and methods. To meet these operational objectives, ARCO will address three major scientific questions. The first is the epidemiology of drowning: to whom, why, where and when river drowning occurs. The second question relates to the physical, biological and social parameters influencing the drift of a body within a river flow. The third is the method of hydraulic and probabilistic modelling of the victim's trajectory as an Eulerian-Lagrangian problem. ARCO will call upon various scientific disciplines that will combine their concepts, methods and protocols: observation in the field with rescuers, consultation of their archives, geo- and video-questionnaires to investigate practices and representations, experiments on body drift in the laboratory and in the field with dummies, and finally theoretical modelling and numerical calculations. ARCO will be organised in four work packages (WP). WP1 will produce a precise, complete and harmonised database on the occurrences of drownings and their context (e.g. the location, time, victim) in Lyon. It will be used to identify the main physical/biophysical (e.g. river discharge and temperature) and socio-cultural factors (uses, practices, representations) governing these drownings (for WP2 and 3). The extension of the database to other cities will help building a generalized model of hot-spot/hot-moment of drowning incident to help urban planners, policy-makers, river brigades and rescuers in their missions of prevention and security. WP2 will focus on the key parameters that influence the drift of a body. These parameters are many and relate to both the victim (clothes, weight and height, age, sex) and the river where it drowned (water velocity, temperature). The necessary parametric study will be based on tests with small-scale models in the laboratory, and in the field with a specific training dummy whose trajectory will be followed. WP3 will develop a model predicting the distribution of a victim’s locations in the river at a given time. To do so, it will integrate the flow conditions (WP1) and parameters (WP2) into a model of the victim's trajectory, itself applied to the river flow computed using an Eulerian modelling. The integration of this model into a smartphone or tablet application for use by the emergency services will not be done during the project, but it is the future target for WP3. ARCO will adopt an interdisciplinary scientific approach at the crossroads of human and physical geography, fluvial hydraulics and geomorphology. Our consortium includes five academic laboratories, a river operating company and end-users from a local fire and rescue service. In addition to scientific publications, in WP4 (results transfer task) the project will provide a drowning database, a guide to rescue and patrol practices, and the functional specifications of the future smartphone/tablet application to help divers from rescue services in urban areas with large rivers.