CounteR Project 5th Technical Meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria
The European Institute and IMMAGA co-hosted the fifth technical meeting of the CounteR Project in Sofia, where consortium partners gathered from September 26 to 28, 2023. The meeting agenda included a comprehensive review of the registered progress and discussions on strategies for the final stages of the project as well as on the testing and validation of the software tool designed to detect radical content in the online environment.
On the first day, researchers from UCSC highlighted the shift of research trends, moving away from the exploration of individual radicalized identities to an emphasis on identifying vulnerabilities within the radicalization hotspots. The partners also discussed the advancements made in terms of data collection, image and social network analysis, semantic reasoning, and insight correlation.
The second day of the meeting was dedicated to data privacy and ethics requirements, which are of the utmost importance for the CounteR consortium. The latest updates concerning end-user training sessions, field demonstrators and the system’s deployment were provided. With the project's conclusion on the horizon, business exploitation, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management and project sustainability constituted some of the major topics covered during the meeting.
Capitalizing on the presence of most partners in Sofia, the consortium seized the opportunity to extend the meeting and conduct a dedicated piloting session on the third day. Technical partners provided the LEAs (law enforcement agencies) that are involved as end-users in the project with hands-on training on the software tool’s functionalities. Subsequently, the LEAs validated the tool's second version, focusing on the NLP (natural language processing) module. The identified issues were meticulously documented to enhance the platform's overall quality and user experience.
The Privacy-First Situational Awareness Platform for Violent Terrorism and Crime Prediction, Counter Radicalization and Citizen Protection Project or CounteR is funded by the Horizon 2020 program of the European Union and submitted under the H2020-SU-SEC-2020 call for proposals, with project ID 101021607.
