INDECT For the Security of Citizens - a Minority Report?

 Security of citizens is one of the most important priorities of EU. This fact has been emphasized in the Fourth European Security Research Conference in Stockholm, 29th-30th September, 2009. For EU FP7 Research Programme, Security call has been announced in 2007.

INDECT project has been initiated by the Polish Platform for Homeland Security (http://www.ppbw.pl/index-en.html). The Project proposal was submitted by the international, pan-European consortium of 17 partners, led by the AGH University of Science and Technology (Krakow, Poland), under the supervision of Professor Andrzej Dziech, the INDECT Project Coordinator. The consortium consists of 11 well-known universities, 4 companies and 2 end-users (Police Service of Northern Ireland and Polish General Headquarters of Police). It should be underlined that the INDECT project is a research project, allowing involved European scientists to develop new, advanced and innovative algorithms and methods aiming at combating terrorism and other criminal activities, such as human trafficking and organised crime which are affecting citizens’ safety.

The INDECT project is a standard Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) research project. The project is financed under the Security Theme of FP7. The legal basis of the Security Theme is Council Decision 2006/971/EC1. The INDECT project started on the first of January 2009 for duration of 60 months. The INDECT Project aims at developing tools for enhancing the security of citizens and protecting the confidentiality of recorded and stored information as well as the privacy of involved persons. INDECT targets threat detection in both real environments (intelligent cameras) and virtual environments (computer networks, especially Internet).

The main objectives of the INDECT Project are:

to develop an intelligent information system for automatic detection of threats and recognition of criminal behavior or violence,

to develop techniques for data and privacy protection in storage and transmission of data based on quantum cryptography and new methods of digital watermarking.

to develop new techniques and solutions providing tools to support activities of police officers, including tools for threat detection in the Internet; this includes the development of a new type of search engine combining direct search of images and video based on watermarked contents and storage of metadata in the form of digital watermarks,

The INDECT research area is defined by the FP7 security call "Increasing the Security of citizens" (SEC-1). The INDECT Project ensures strict fulfillment of the EU ethical regulations on privacy, data protection, prevention of dual use, etc. Following these regulations, a lot of attention is paid to ethical issues, and among others, the INDECT Project will never involve processing of any personal data without the prior written consent of individuals.

The INDECT methodology imposes, first, detecting specific crimes (such as Internetchild pornography, trafficking of human organs, spread of botnets, viruses, malwareas well as terrorism, and organized crime), then detecting the source of the identifiedcrimes (for example, specific criminals responsible for the crimes). It is alwaysthe human being (police, security services etc.) who finally decides whether anintervention should take place once a source has been identified.

Among the main expected results of the INDECT project are:

trial of intelligent analysis of video and audio data for threat detection in urban environments,

creation of tools and technology for privacy and data protection during storage and transmission of information using quantum cryptography and new methods of digital watermarking,

performing computer-aided detection of threats and targeted crimes in Internet resources with privacy-protecting solutions,

construction of a search engine for rapid semantic search based on watermarking of content related to child pornography and human organ trafficking,

implementation of a distributed computer system that is capable of effective intelligent processing.

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