The project is on track and has achieved the two planned milestones, i.e. MS1 – Project setup and platform development roadmap (M06), and MS2 – Operational prototype (M12). The project started with the definition of the requirements specification framework combining all the technical assets to enhance or develop in the project, aligned with the use case definition and operational requirements.
The main achievements in the first reporting period can be summarized as follows:
- End-users requirements and scenarios definition: End user requirements have been established by relevant stakeholders. A conclusive list was developed including many user requirements which will be critical in the development of all components. Three initial, realistic, contemporary pilot use cases were developed.
- HMEs recipes collection from online sources - During the first year of the project, consortium have provided an initial version of our Web crawler for accessing and crawling data from the Surface, Deep and Dark Web for discovery and acquisition of online HMEs recipes. For the reporting period consortium has performed thorough research of state-of-the-art approaches towards multilingual text analysis and machine translation, with focus on the field of security and specifically on explosives. Additionally Multimodal data analytics for extracting intelligence were studied and three distinct methods were developed: Classification; Clustering; and Social network analysis.
- Improving knowledge on explosives precursors – During first year of the project a review of information from a number of sources including online, relevant works of literature, police reports and related projects was undertaken. A list of pyrotechnics was compiled.
– Suspicious transactions in the supply chain – Project consortium for the first yea established an initial list of fields that are required for the output of the economic operator ecosystems transaction simulators. Based on that list, a first prototype of the simulator was developed and tested on dummy data. In addition consortium conducted a thorough literature analysis aiming at identifying the most appropriate data processing and artificial intelligence methods to be exploited in the development of the Suspicious Transaction Detection module (STD).
- Enhanced Sensing for Explosive Precursors detection in Air and Water - During RP1, most technical activities were focused on the design and adaptations required for all technologies to operate in the planned environments and detect the target analyses.
- Development and integration of the ODYSSEUS platform - During the reporting period, this work initiated its activities towards the design of the ODYSSEUS platform architecture. In this context, initial information was collected by the technical partners which led to the initial component list of the ODYSSEUS platform. In addition, several discussions took place, mainly with the technical partners of the consortium, to shape a high-level view of the platform and its operation, to clarify and initiate the definition of the integration aspects, and to investigate options for the ODYSSEUS data model that will be adopted.
Dissemination & Communication: ODYSSEUS has already been presented at:
• CERIS FCT workshop on explosives (19 Oct 2021, online)
• Projects to Policy Seminar (30 Jun – 01 Jul 2022, Brussels, Belgium)
• Research and Innovation Symposium for European Security and Defence (RISE-SD) 2022 (31 May - 2 June 2022, Plovdiv, Bulgaria)
• XI International Scientific Conference HEMUS 2022, Research, technology and innovation - basis for building new defence capabilities (June 2 and 3, 2022, International Fair Plovdiv, Bulgaria)
and dissemination material in the form of website, posters, flyers, videos produced and distributed. Ethical principles and legal requirements were established to guide both the project research and its technological development activities. In summary, ODYSSEUS Project has achieved innovation and promising new concepts that are detailed in the relevant evaluation reports.
