UBITECH participats at the virtual kick-off meeting hosted by CERTH (October 7, 2022) of the Ceasefire Innovation Action, officially started on October 1st, 2022. The project is funded by European Commission under Horizon Europe Programme (Grant Agreement No. 101073876) and spans on the period October 2022 – September 2025. Ceasefire targets the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech and versatile approach for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of EU Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their struggle to detect, analyze and track cross-border illicit firearms trafficking related activities.
In particular, Ceasefire efforts will concentrate on the following major driving axes: a) the development of advanced Artificial Intelligence (ΑΙ) technologies for significantly facilitating the everyday work of the involved practitioners, and b) the establishment of fully-operational National Focal Points (NFPs), by targeting to alleviate from current organizational, operational, cooperation, legal, cross-jurisdictional, trans-border and information exchange challenges. The former corresponds to a wide set of AI-enabled tools, including solutions for cyber patrolling, Web data gathering, on-the-spot detection of firearms, advanced Big Data analytics, cryptocurrency analysis, large-scale information fusion, visual analytics and firearms-related intelligence collection.
In Ceasefire, UBITECH undertakes the development of the open source intelligence collection and real-time systematic firearms incident data gathering tool, constituting a highly configurable, semantically-aware and multi-threaded web crawling system for retrieving data regarding firearm incidents (e.g. seizures, shootings, deaths, suicides, homicides, etc.) from open sources (i.e. news articles, press releases, blogs, forums, social media, online repositories, etc.). Moreover, UBITECH drives the implementation of the dark web and darknet marketplace analysis tools, that realize a highly configurable, semantically-aware and multi-threaded dark web crawling system designed to navigate (via web personas) in dark Web forums and darknet marketplaces.
