CounteR project General Meeting in Paris
The CounteR consortium met in Paris on the 13th and 14th of June 2022 for the project's second General Meeting, hosted by INRIA. This meeting provided an excellent opportunity for partners to meet face-to-face for the first time, but since not all of them could attend, it was held in a hybrid format. The main objectives of the meeting were to review the current status of project activities, analyze the tasks in progress, plan for upcoming project deliverables and discuss financial and technical reporting details.
The meeting was opened by ASSIST Software, with the coordinator presenting the meeting agenda and addressing key project management issues, before inviting work package leaders to give an update on the status of the associated deliverables. Universita Catolica de Sacro Cuore provided a compelling overview of the work performed thus far in WP2 - Social and Psychological Factors in the Radicalisation Process. The progress registered in WP 3 - Data Acquisition & Management was presented by CINI and INRIA, focusing on data management and data collection from social media, blogs, forums and websites. The day was wrapped up with an overview of WP4 - Data Analytics for Detecting Radical Content, provided by INRIA, Imagga and ELTE, with an emphasis on social network analysis and image analysis. Since this project involves data gathering and processing, WP 7 - Data Privacy and Ethics Requirements is designed to ensure full compliance with European GPDR regulations. To this end, Eticas and MITLA talked about data privacy and anonymization, social impact assessment, and the ethics briefing pack.
The second day of the meeting was initiated with a report on WP5 - Data Modelling Ecosystem, analyzing the outcomes of semantic reasoning activities, Deep Reinforcement Learning and network algorithms implementation. ASSIST Software then took over to provide a CounteR platform user interface demo within WP 6 - Backend, Frontend, and Infrastructure. To enable representatives of law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to use the platform to its full capability, Insikt, Nova and SPP are collaborating within WP 8 - End-user Training & Knowledge Empowerment & Pilots, to simulate datasets for the pilot use cases and establish the methodology of the LEAs’ future training sessions. The meeting was concluded by EI and MITLA, with a review of the project’s dissemination activities and communication strategy.
The next opportunity for CounteR partners to get together will be in September 2022, for the 3rd Technical Meeting, where they will further explore the technical progress, identify risks and propose mitigation measures, and synchronize the upstream and downstream tasks.
