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Welcome to the 6th ROXANNE newsletter

About ROXANNE

Fighting organised crime remains an important but challenging task for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in all countries. In the ROXANNE consortium, LEAs, industry and academia have joined forces in the fight against organised crime. With this aim, the project has developed an advanced data analysis solution to enhance and assist police investigations, following a privacy-by-design approach, while reducing the cost and burden to society due to organised criminal activities.

The main goal of the project is to develop an interactive platform with AI intelligence that will combine advanced text, speech and language technologies along with network analysis to help investigators in their daily work with the analysis of complex criminal cases by enabling the ingestion and processing of large volumes of data. The ROXANNE project fully complies with the European and International legal frameworks while ensuring that both privacy and individual rights are well respected. ROXANNE aims not only to improve and assist police investigations but also to speed up investigative processes and support LEAs decision-making.

Join us at the ROXANNE Final Conference


With ROXANNE project ending in December 2022, the Consortium is organizing a Final Conference in Paris. The event will take place on Tuesday, 29th of November 2022, from 9:00 AM to around 5:00 PM CET at Campus Cyber, Capgemini Technology Services, 5 Rue Bellini, 92800 Puteaux (Paris), France and is planned to be a hybrid meeting.

During the event, we will present the results of the project, including the ROXSD dataset and the Autocrime platform. It will be an excellent opportunity to discuss the outcomes of the project with LEAs together with our technical partners. We will also present the exploitation path for the Autocrime platform, discuss the ethics approach to ROXANNE and explain main challenges encountered during the project together with recommendations that became visible during the project life span. 


Click on the button below to register. Registration is open till 14 November.


     

Making the world a safer place – INTERPOL’s views on the ROXANNE Project 

The impact of new technologies on criminal activity is one of the areas in which LEAs must remain at the forefront of innovation to stay ahead of criminals. ROXANNE’s research objective is aligned with INTERPOL’s mission of making the world a safer place. By participating in the research efforts into the development of an innovative policing solution such as ROXANNE’s, INTERPOL’s contribution focuses on end-user needs and outreach as well as on the legal implications.

Three years after the project launch, we achieved a lot as a multidisciplinary consortium of 25 partners from 15 countries, bringing together 11 LEAs, as well as several representatives from industry and academia. Together we explored the operational, technical, legal, societal and ethical perspectives related to the evolving field of advanced data analysis technologies. In particular, we worked hard to ensure that the final solution meets the operational needs of law enforcement, while guided by the privacy-by-design approach, integrating requirements for legal compatibility with INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data, EU legal framework and national legislation.

 

Read more here

     

What we have been up to

Research work during the past 6 months 

Throughout the course of the project, many research topics have been explored by the partners and we are currently working to turn the research and development efforts into scientific journal publications. In the following blog we summarise the different research topics for which such efforts are currently considered. Read more here


Technology updates – the Autocrime platform

The Autocrime platform was constantly updated during the last six months integrating additional features and taking into account the feedback from LEAs based on their experiences. The latest release of the platform is intended to be installed on user’s machine, e.g., laptop and supports several Operating Systems; namely Linux Ubuntu, MacOS (including M1 chipsets) and Windows (using a Virtual Machine). In the following blog you can read about the latest updates. Read more here


Consortium Updates 

During the last 6 months, ROXANNE partners had the chance to meet twice. The first occasion was during the Workshops organized in Athens, while the second was during the 3rd and Final Field Test. Our partners also participated in Formobile sister project final conference.

The third and Final Field Test

 

During the ROXANNE project, three field tests have been organised. The first field test took place on 30 September 2020 online (due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions) and was organised by KEMEA. It presented the preliminary capabilities of the ROXANNE platform i.e., combining speech and text technologies along with network analysis methods. The second field test, was organised in hybrid mode (both onsite and online) by NFI on 8 October 2021, during which the platform’s latest capabilities and case scenarios were demonstrated. 

On 6 October 2022, in Lyon, France, at the Interpol’s premises the third and final field test of ROXANNE took place. More than 50 participants attended the event, including ROXANNE partners, coming from various backgrounds: law enforcement officers, legal and technical experts, policymakers and researchers. The objectives of the third field test were to showcase the latest ROXANNE capabilities and to present the platform’s mature capabilities alongside its performance and usefulness for solving criminal cases through streamlined data analysis.

Read more here

     

Diving deeper into ROXANNE

 

Our approach to ethics

Ethics work in ROXANNE has continued at pace since the last newsletter. A major part of this work has been developing a risk assessment to recognise and deal with a range of issues that could arise when providing technologies like those in ROXANNE to LEA investigators to use. As ROXANNE is a research project, the Autocrime platform that has been developed will need further development work after the project has finished, in order to take the outputs from research results to something that could be used in investigations. If this process is carried out and completed, then ROXANNE project partners would not want their technologies to fall into the wrong hands. So, a ‘know your customer’-style process has been developed to deal with risks associated with exploitation of project results. This considers how potential end-user organisations are structured, located, and managed, how they use technologies, the legal and ethical frameworks applicable to them, whether they transfer technologies to third parties, the quality of their data protection and information security measures, steps taken to avoid misuse and mass surveillance, outside influences, and whether technology providers would accept the risks that could be placed onto others. Where risks of providing technologies to a particular end-user organisation are too great, then technologies in question should not be provided to them. This risk assessment methodology will be given to partners who could end up providing project results to other organisations to use; the methodology will also be made available in the final project deliverables so that others can access and use this methodology.


Collaboration with sister projects 

 

Ethics and legal partners have continued collaborating with colleagues from the FORMOBILE and LOCARD projects, despite those projects ending. This continuing collaboration is focused on a joint paper studying the implications of the EU’s proposed eEvidence regulation for privacy and data protection. Colleagues aim to publish the paper before the end of the project.


     

The reading corner

Blogs:


     

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Work Programme for research and innovation 2018-2020, under grant agreement n°833635. Disclaimer: the document reflects only the author's views and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.