Delving deeper into the Human Machine Interface of the COPKIT EW/EA eco-system

The COPKIT partners met in Delft, Netherlands, on 13-14 February 2019 for their third workshop, which was kindly hosted by our partner Thales Nederland, COPKIT’s technical manager.

The workshop has been essential to explore the analysts’ daily workflows and move forward with the user-centric design for an HMI (Human Machine Interface). Once completed, this HMI will support the analysts’ daily task workflows and mental needs when they use COPKIT’s Early Warning / Early Action technological system. Dedicated sessions of the meeting were focused also on the security, privacy and ethics requirements of the COPKIT technologies, in addition to the general discussions necessary to help design the rationale behind the HMI and configure it according to the LEAs’ needs.

The workshop has also been a good occasion to welcome VICESSE, our new partner and innovation manager who will help define the best exploitation strategy for our tools.

 

Representatives from EUROPOL, ENLETS (European Network of Law Enforcement Technology Services) and the Spanish Armed Forces Intelligence Center also attended the event to provide valuable advice and to discuss the security and access control requirements of the COPKIT ecosystem.

EUROPOL leads COPKIT’s End-User & Stakeholder Advisory Board (EUSAB), an external and independent board of end users and experts from different fields that counsel the consortium on the practical implementation of the project goals, as well as on issues regarding its direction, progress, outcomes, and deliverables.

Their presence at the workshop was followed by a visit to their premises in The Hague the next day (15 February 2019). That day an interesting exchange of information occurred between COPKIT and different EUROPOL department representatives to explore possible further ways of collaboration.

What next?

The Consortium will convene again soon at their annual meeting to recap the general objectives and status of the project and plan the next steps. Over the following months, they will also be attending a number of events on security and information systems.

The project has been invited to participate in the next event of the Community of Users on Secure, Safe and Resilient Societies (CoU). CoU has developed into an efficient platform of exchanges among actors of different branches of security and crisis management. Over the past four years, the European Commission has organized series of workshops in Brussels covering the main areas of the Secure Societies Programme with close connection to parent H2020 programmes.

The CoU event will take place at the end of March this year and will have two thematic days focused on cyber issues. The event intends to be a sort of dialogue between Law Enforcement and projects developing digital tools related to the needs of Law Enforcement. The Project Coordinator and the Technical Coordinator will be attending the two-day event, together with Guardia Civil and the Belgian police partners who will be representing the two main use cases in the project.

Later in the year, our partners Universidad de Granada and Legind Technologies will be organising a special session on Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery, within the 13th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS) which will take place in Italy, on 2-5 July, 2019.