The NOTIONES kick-off meeting was held on September 13th, 2021 as an online event. The Project Coordinator Mrs. Concepción Cortes Velasco (TECNALIA) welcomed the participants and gave an overview over the whole project structure, consisting in subsequent conceptual steps encased into eight project Work Packages (WPs) throughout the project duration which will be 5 years, from September 2022 to August 2027.

The European Commission (EC) was represented at the meeting by the Project Officer Mrs. Cristina Longo, Research Programme Administrator. She provided advices and recommendations for the success of the project.

The Scientific and Technical Coordinator (Zanasi & Partners) then proceeded with a presententation on the specific challenges and scope of the project, considering the call description, the expected impact and the requirements. As such, the NOTIONES project answers the H2020 SU-GM01-2020 Option 1 Call, which addresses the problem that Security and Intelligence practitioners have few opportunities to monitor useful research and innovation, and to interact with academia and industry. Thus, the Call required to build a network of security and intelligence practitioners that has the objective to support the needs of the security and intelligence services for future security research programming.

The NOTIONES consortium, which includes many practitioners from intelligence, military, civil, financial, judiciary, local, national and international polices, experts in security research programming, as well as representatives of academy and industry, for a total of 20 countries covered among EU Members States, Associated Countries and other Countries.

During the kick-off meeting all WP leaders presented in detail the activities foreseen in each work package, providing early indications for a smooth beginning of the work, considering that the project is expected to deliver more than thirty reports just in the first year. Indeed, NOTIONES is a very vital, living project, with a huge number of work products, meetings, working groups, and events (workshops and conferences).

The NOTIONES kick-off meeting was a success and all partners showed excitement for the beginning of the project, under the guidance of the project Coordinator and EC Project Officer.

The Work Package 2 (WP2) of the NOTIONES project was focused on the Intelligence process and formulation of preliminary requirements of the stakeholders.  As such it was implemented during the Months 1 to 6. The WP2 aims at describing the activities, needs, expectations and preliminary requirements of the intelligence community in two ways: (1) gathering the practitioners’ perspective through interviews and facilitated sessions; and (2) describing the state-of-the-arts of the nodes of the intelligence cycle. Moreover, the WP2 also investigated the role of ethics in intelligence.

The output of the WP2 is a set of deliverables depicting the constraints, needs and requirements of intelligence, to be considered in subsequent WPs.

The WP2 resulted in five deliverables/reports: (1) Design of the interviews with intelligence practitioners; (2) Synthesis of the interviews’ results; (3) The intelligence cycle; and (4) Intelligence Ethics. Two of the reports were presented and discussed during the First NOTIONES conference in June 2022 in Brussels, Belgium.

In this first year of the project, NOTIONES has also worked hard to browse the market and the relevant literature to identify state-of-the-art technologies applicable to security investigations. This has been the focus of the research work of Work Package 3.

As part of this work a total of 7 reports have been released on cutting-edge technologies and initiatives around tools for intelligence. The reports studied multiple information sources included EU-supported R&D activity databases, including projects from H2020, ISF-P, scientific repositories, etc. The reports include 4 reviews of technology landscape for the following intelligence disciplines: IMINT & SIGINT, MASINT, HUMINT, OSINT & Web analysis. Furthermore, 3 reports are dedicated to horizontal technologies, namely, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Mass Surveillance. Together with the technology survey, all the reports identify challenges and recommendations for technology adoption by LEAs.

The security practitioners and technology institutes participating in NOTIONES are involved in working groups that elaborate on the outcomes from these reports and discuss challenges, risks and opportunities for the adoption of studied technologies. The discussions identify security stakeholders’ requirements with respect to technology innovations that could fill gaps in capability and improve intelligence cycle performance.

Work Package 4 (WP4) of the project was concerned with the terrorist process.  Its aims were defined as analyzing the most relevant terrorist threats, while focusing on the most dangerous and unexpected use of technologies. As terrorism becomes fragmented and even more radicalized, the face of terrorism is changing from organizations to small calls or ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, although many of those small cells receive support from wider radical movements. This WP analyzed the changing technological terror threats which are facing intelligence services all over Europe. The terrorist threats were analyzed in five categories, each with a corresponding task: Ideology and Narratives, Behavior, Financing, Cyber Terrorism and Means of Attack.

WP4 resulted in five deliverables, each corresponding to the five categories of analysis of the terrorist process.  The deliverables were the result of extensive research by the project partners, with input from practitioners both within and outside the project consortium.  The results thus obtained enable LEAs and intelligence services all over Europe to better understand the nature, characteristics, financing and means of attack by terrorist groups and individuals.  The veracious deliverables are complementary in that together they provide a wide and deep overview of the different aspects of the terrorist process.

The innovation monitoring work package of NOTIONES researched recent technologies useful for Intelligence and Security operations, together with emerging terrorist threats.

Several technologies met the interest of the NOTIONES practitioners such as the technologies for Dark Web monitoring, as many Intelligence services need advanced automated tools in order to perform their investigations in a more efficient manner. To this purpose, we reached out to other EC-funded projects that are developing products in this field, thus extending the NOTIONES network.

Another technology that was considered highly relevant is the Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI): the security risks related to transferring data in commercial external servers such as the Cloud, often in foreign countries, were recognised as a key issue in NOTIONES. For those applicative cases where the type of data and computation needed allow it, Edge AI may help solve this problem by minimizing the need of data transfer.

In addition to the search for new technologies, the innovation monitoring activities were also directed towards the in-depth study of existing and/or proposed regulations regarding the use of artificial intelligence systems in the European Union. The detailed analysis of the Artificial Intelligence Act (“AIA”, COM(2021) 206 final 2021/0106 (COD)), has led to discussions about the concept of human-centric AI and the role of human supervisors on the technological solutions adopted by practitioners (cfr. Art.14).

Finally, this work package identified nine emerging technologies that have potential future use by terrorists: Electric autonomous vehicles, Cryptocurrencies, 3-D printing, Wind and solar energy farms, Robotics in health services and human care services, Bioengineering (CBRN), Hard encrypted social networks - including steganography, Quantum computing, and Virtual reality. These technologies will be explored in the NOTIONES project in next months.

Laurea organised the 1st Workshop on February 15^th 2022 as an online event due to the pandemic situation. The workshop was hosted on Howspace platform and consisted of three co-creation rounds, where mixed groups of practitioners, academia members, technology providers and other participants examined four topics on intelligence activities. The discussion topics were selected by the participants from a larger group of fifteen themes that were identified as interesting by the practitioner members of the consortium.

Based on the workshop insights, two discussion topics were further examined in the founding meetings of the First Working Group round (T6.1). Two sub-groups were established consisting of practitioners, academia and technology providers. The sub-groups concentrated on the following topics: 1. Technological needs, solutions and improvements to the analysis phase of the intelligence cycle and 2. Various challenges in monitoring and collecting data from the dark web, and continued their activities until October 2022.

Altogether 32 people participated in the workshop (KPI >20). The overall feedback from the event was throughout positive and rated either as ‘Excellent’ or ‘Above average’ by the respondents.

The first project results were published in the 1^st Conference (T7.2)

Laurea coordinated the 1^st Conference (T7.2) as a face-to-face event in Brussels on 15 June 2022. The Consortium participated in the task by preparing the material and the presentations for the conference and by inviting participants, including the keynote speaker. The main topic of the conference was: “How can the existing and emerging technologies enhance or hamper the activities of European intelligence and law enforcement agencies”. The keynote speech was given by Prof. Garik Markarian on the topic “Emerging Technologies for Law Enforcement and Intelligent Services and Associated Social Implications”. The rest of the program consisted of a presentation on artificial intelligence, seven participatory sessions and a panel discussion.

Altogether 47 participants both from inside and outside of the NOTIONES consortium participated the conference (KPI ≥ 35). The 9 external participants represented 7 different organizations (KPI ≥ 5), including the EC (DG-HOME). The overall feedback of the event was very positive.

Visit our project website to learn more about further exciting results of the NOTIONES project and inform on planned future activities!

NOTIONES partners: