AVALANCHE Vision: While technological solutions for investigations and global cooperation do exist, they are mostly fragmented and myopic focusing on providing very narrow and isolated functions within their own boundaries without ensuring interoperability and international cooperation. To alleviate the limitations of existing solutions, AVALANCHE aims to make transformative steps towards the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech, and versatile solution for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of LEAs in their struggle to detect, analyse, track, investigate and prevent cross-border illicit activities of high-risk criminal networks, migrant smuggling, firearms, drugs, child exploitation, terrorism, cyber and intellectual property crime coordinated through the digital world. Building on Pillars I and II, the AVALANCHE platform will offer tools for semi-automatic collection of evidence to foster explainable investigations and reasoning through intelligence-led methods and contextual-aware gleaning of actions. Also, building on Pillar III, the AVALANCHE platform will provide interoperable systems and interconnection with national and international databases through common standards, data and schemas alignment, and mediation to foster information exchange and international cooperation. To guarantee the wide SMEs solutions adoption by the actual practitioners, AVALANCHE will produce training curricula, benchmark with Europol’s Innovation Lab, contribute to LEAs operational standards and establish a broad ecosystem of crime-relevant stakeholders, and complement its objectives by continuously receiving guidance from the EU Policy Instrument (EMPACT). Finally, AVALANCHE will validate the integrated platform through a demonstration in diverse business scenarios of HP that cover key operational domains (from cross-border illicit activities to antisemitism, and more) with notable societal and market impact.

PopEye unique value proposition focuses on a) strengthening the security at the external EU borders through fusing robust biometric technologies for verification and identification, b) maximising the travellers’ experience when crossing the external EU borders through unobtrusive on-the-move biometric technologies, c) improving the productivity of Border Authorities and Law Enforcement Agencies in performing identification and verification of people on the move and without stopping them, at up to 200m distance, when multiple travellers cross borders, on foot or inside the same vehicle, in different nature e.g. open-air conditions, night, time, time constraints, space constraints, etc. PopEye will introduce novel and robust biometric technologies in the five areas identified by the aforementioned Frontex report combined with gait recognition, in order to maximise the impact and the return on investment in short term. PopEye through the proposed technologies will support both EU and Third Country Nationals (TCN) citizens, will be compliant with existing and upcoming regulations such as GDPR and AI Act, will comply with the Ethics Guidelines on Trustworthy AI (2019), will empower the EU values and fundamental rights, including on data protection and avoid bias and discrimination.

The World Economic Forum suggests that transnational travel will increase by 50% over the next ten years, bringing the number of arrivals to 1.8bn by 2030 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the ever-increasing travel both on land and sea, delays and queues are often observed at cases where people are crossing border. These delays create huge frustration for the citizens and at the same time put extra burden to the border authorities’ staff. In Europe, airports have managed to improve to a certain extend the border crossing through the facial recognition booths for European citizens that own an RFID enabled passport, however there are still huge queues observed. For non-European citizens, the situation is even worse. The border control for land and sea are placing all the effort to the border authorities staff requiring from them to check the passports of the travellers as well as to control the luggage and baggage. Reasonably, even without huge number of travellers, large delays and queues are observed. ODYSSEUS will enable citizens to seamlessly cross the border without stopping, while reducing the workload and improving productivity for Border Guard Authorities by providing highly detailed risk analysis. ODYSSEUS will leverage the power of digital technology offering to citizens the appropriate tools to cross land and sea borders in a secure and seamless manner without stopping while equipping the border authorities with novel tools for secure identity verification and unobtrusive vehicle/luggage/cargo checks, eliminating long delays at border areas. The proposed technologies will allow citizens to cross borders without any intervention by just leveraging their smartphones combined with strong and continuous identity verification. Remote vehicle/luggage scanning through X-Rays and UAVs, will allow authorities to remotely perform the appropriate controls.

TENSOR will provide LEAs a platform that facilitates the biometric evidence extraction, sharing and storage in cross border environments allowing them to share best practices in an automated, robust, secure, privacy-preserving and scalable manner. In addition, the full potential of biometrics technologies will be exploited and their fusion in case of partial evidence gathered in the crime scenes by forensic institutes strengthening their acceptance in the court of justice. More particularly, TENSOR will equip security practitioners with novel tools focusing on (a) Extraction of biometrics and other more or less distinctive features validated in forensic conditions that assist LEAs in identification, identity verification, intelligence and investigation processes and can be leveraged to unlock criminals’ mobile devices; (b) Sharing of biometrics through secure, automated, scalable exchange of biometric intelligence and court-proof evidence among LEAs in a cross-border manner, enhancing interoperability among legacy systems owned by security practitioners and Forensic Institutes; and (c) Storage of biometrics in a privacy-preserving way through a biometric data protection mechanism enabling revocability of biometric templates. TENSOR will also introduce the one-of-its-kind European Biometric Data Space creating a common ground among LEAs, Forensic Institutes and Security Researchers assisting in the faster adoption of modern biometric solutions.

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.