About Asgard

ASGARD aims to contribute to LEA Technological Autonomy, by building a sustainable, long-lasting community for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and the R&D industry. This community will develop, maintain and evolve a best-of-class tool set for the extraction, fusion, exchange and analysis of Big Data, including cyber-offense data for forensic investigation. ASGARD will help LEAs to significantly increase their analytical capabilities. Forensics being a focus of ASGARD, both intelligence and foresight dimensions are addressed by the project.

 

By the end of the project ASGARD will deliver an active and sustainable community with a large representation of the different stakeholders.

 

Fluid, Frequent, and Fruitful collaboration between all stakeholders, including short development cycles and face-to-face “Hackathons” every 6 months.

 

ASGARD will enhance LEAs’ efficiency and capabilities in forensic, intelligence, and foresight by delivering a set of easily configurable and deployable tools and applications (not a monolithic platform). The tools to be delivered will be prioritised by LEAs.

 

Build upon the work in prior related projects, ground-breaking technologies tackling LEAs prioritised needs in the fields of multimedia big data acquisition, processing, fusion, mining, visualisation and collaboration.

 

The project includes a licensing and IPR approach coherent with LEA realities and Ethical needs. ASGARD includes a comprehensive approach to Privacy, Ethics, Societal Impact respecting fundamental rights.

 

ASGARD leverages existing trust relationship between LEAs and the research and development industry, and experiential knowledge in FCT research.

The ASGARD project's methodology is structured around short full-development cycles (6 months duration) which conclude with "hackathon" events at which LEA, researchers, and industrial partners jointly evaluate the latest released tools or new versions of existing tools.

Specific challenge:

The availability of petabytes of on-line and off-line information being open to the public owned by the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA), such as police forces and/or custom authorities or the result of the investigation of a (cyber-) offence, represents a valuable resource but also a management challenge. Access to huge amounts of data, structured (data-bases), unstructured (multilingual text, multimedia), semi-structured (HTML, XML, etc.), heterogeneous data collected by LEA sensors such as Video, Audio, GSM and GPS, all possibly obfuscated or anonymized, available locally or over private LEA owned/shared networks or over the Internet, can easily result in an information overload and represent a problem instead of a useful asset.

Coordinator

Vicomtech

Partners

12 LEAs + 15 RTO/UNIV + 6SME/IND
TOTAL = 33

Duration

42 months
2016-09 to 2020-02

Grant Agreement number

700381

Consortium

The ASGARD consortium has been crafted over a long period of time. Given the specific characteristics of the FCT 1 topic it is driven by applied research centres. RTOs will drive (Push) applied and basic research with the goal of Technology Transfer to End Users who will define the requirements (Pull) of the project. Industry plays the role of potential service offering on the results (Facilitate). The SAG and LEA networks in the partnership will enable the community aspect of ASGARD.

Vicomtech

Visual Interaction and Communication Technologies
www.vicomtech.org

Coordinator

Aditess

Advanced Integrated Technology
Solutions & Services Ltd
www.aditess.com

AIT

Austrian Institute of Technology
www.ait.ac.at

BSC

Barcelona Supercomputing Center
www.bsc.es

Politie

Belgian police
www.politie.be

BMI

Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior
www.bmi.qv.at

KEMEA

Centre for Security Studies
kemea.gr/en/

ZRK

Zentrum für Risiko- & Krisenmanagement
www.zfrk.org

ITI

Information Technologies Institute
www.iti.gr

DCU

Dublin City University
www.dcu.ie

Engineering

www.eng.it

CAST

Centre for Applied Science
and Technology Information
www.gov.uk/government/collections/centre-for-applied-science-and-technology-information

INOV

Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Inovação
www.inov.pt

Carabinieri

Italian Carabinieri (IT CC)
www.carabinieri.it

L-1

Identity Solutions AG
www.morpho.com

Guardia Civil

www.guardiacivil.es

NICC - INCC

National Institute for Criminalistics and Criminology
http://nicc.fgov.be/

Polisen

Swedish Police
www.nfc.polisen.se

Nederlands Forensic Institute

www.forensicinstitute.nl

Polícia Judiciária

Portuguese Criminal Police
www.pj.pt

Poliisi

Police of Finland
www.poliisi.fi

FOI

Swedish Defence Research Agency
www.foi.se

University of Amsterdam

www.uva.nl

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

http://cris.unimore.it

UCD

University College Dublin
http://dfire.ucd.ie/

University of Konstanz

www.vis.uni-konstanz.de/en/

Ulster University

www.ulster.ac.uk

Work Plan

The project duration will be 42 months and is organised in 5 phases:

Phase 1

  • The initial “Ramp up” phase (M1-M3) will focus on project governance and operational structures (e.g., management and quality plans, Ethical Social Impact Review Board and Stakeholder Advisory Group kick-offs), relevant research will be analysed, and work related to use-cases definition and Social Ethical Legal and Privacy activities will start.

Phase 2

  • During the “Prove feasibility” phase (M4-M15), platform foundations will be set and State-of-the-Art technologies will be integrated. Available datasets feasibility study will also take place in this phase.

Phase 3

  • The “Show efficiency” phase (M16-M27) will focus on development of new tools and applications, as well as on use-cases refinement.

Phase 4

  • The “Application adaptation” phase (M28-M39) will focus on ensuring domain adaptation of the tools and applications, up-scaling, increasing collaboration, and on training and certification.

Phase 5

  • Finally, the “Ramp down” phase (M40-M42) will focus on project commissioning and closure.