EU FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT TIPS

Scope:

Proposals should focus on the accurate identification of terrorist online communities (even hiding their real identity), accurate and fast categorization of malicious content published by terrorists and their supporters in multiple languages, large-scale temporal analysis of terrorism trends, and real-time summarization of multilingual and multimedial information published by terrorists, including content filtering for mis- and disinformation and framing. In addition, linking pseudonyms and finding the original author should be part of the research. The developed methodologies should be able to handle massive amounts of multilingual and multimedial web content in minimal time. The scope of the proposed tool should involve law enforcement bodies from the design phase to the prototyping and test phase.

The proposals should address the management of personal data, and related ethical and legal issues. Therefore considerable attention will have to be given to privacy and data protection, and to the adherence to European regulations. For each proposed solution, potential issues vis-à-vis these rights and regulations will have to be analysed, and recommendations on the best solutions to these issues must be proposed.

The development of a base line system for current and future end users should also be envisaged and the solution should follow Open Source concepts.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between €3m and €5m would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Scope:

Proposals should focus on how to extract, compare, correlate, filter, reason over and/or interpret suspect information, data, communications stored and/or transferred on the Internet including on the deepweb, darknet and other less easily accessible parts of networks, obtained under a lawful warrant, in order to discover facts and evidence to support forensic investigations (including e.g. resolving identities in social networks, authorship identification on webfora, shared media, etc.). Software and, if necessary, hardware tools, methods and guidelines should be proposed. They should tackle all the layers of analysis, from the data-packet level to the data mining, to language interpretation, semantic analysis, and information retrieval, including the multi-lingual aspects, and video and picture analysis. Investigative techniques on any kind of crime using the Internet to some extent (to communicate, transfer data, etc.) should be concerned. The proposed solutions should enable accelerated searches of the huge amount of data-transfer that occurs on the Internet, and to discover and make clear (interpret) out of it the relevant data and information. At the same time, limited, or at least controlled, pervasiveness of the proposed solutions must be guaranteed, in order guarantee the privacy of all the internet users. Ethical issues have to be clearly addressed. Appropriate solutions to fulfil the legitimate request of privacy by the citizens should be embedded in the very core of the proposed solutions. Also, all the developed tools, methods and guidelines should be supported by training support and curricula.

Expected impact:

- improved LEA capabilities to conduct investigations by using information travelling and stored on the Internet obtained under a lawful warrant ;

- improved training of LEA staff able to perform these investigations. increased crime prosecution capabilities;

- shorter court cases due to the availability of more solid court proof forensic evidence;

- increased privacy and data protection during forensic investigations;

- for industry better understanding of modern operational LEA requirements, thus increasing their competitiveness.

Deadline Date27-08-2015 17:00:00 (Brussels local time)