MAGNETO – Multimedia Analysis and Correlation Engine for Organized Crime Prevention and Investigation

Project objectives

The MAGNETO research project addresses the significant needs of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their fight against terrorism and organised crime related to the large volumes, heterogeneity and fragmentation of data that officers need to analyse for the prevention, investigation and prosecution of crime. These needs were identified after consultation with eleven different European LEAs - members of the MAGNETO consortium.

Project outcome

To achieve these goals, MAGNETO is testing and demonstrating its development results on five representative and complementary use cases (crime types) under real operational conditions in the facilities of eleven different law enforcement agencies. These are kept in the production loop continuously. Using an agile implementation methodology and a multidisciplinary scientific approach, researchers with exceptional track records, officers with world-class law enforcement operational expertise, recognised experts in legal and ethical compliance with EU and national standards, and qualified training experts in the development of innovative curricula are brought together in a single team.

Coordination: ICCS (Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Zografou, Greece)

German project partner:

• Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB
• Hochschule für den öffentlichen Dienst Bayern (Civil Service University Bavaria)
  
• Polizeipräsidium München (Munich police department)

May 6, 2021

Demo of MAGNETO’s capabilities to the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism representative.

April 20, 2021: MAGNETO goes global

The MAGNETO consortium received an email from the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), working on issues related to AI, as well as from the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism, so as to discuss about the MAGNETO project.

March 18, 2021: MAGNETO Tool Demo at LEAs premises

Several demonstrations have been led at several LEAs premises on different topics of MAGNETO project. Among the presented features of the MAGNETO platform, the following have been the favorite ones for the LEAs partner: Geolocalization map, Automatic transcription audio to text, Sentiment analysis, Keywords extraction, Data analysis, Semantic reasoning, Video and image processing, People comparison tool, Event Fusion, Trajectory fusion.

Here are some feedbacks form the LEAs:

• Demonstration at Sabadell: All the presented features seemed at least useful to very useful. Nevertheless, SAB highlighted that the possibility of working with various types of data at the same time, because the data is fragmented in different documents, would be very useful and that the tool itself merges or joins the different files and the specific tool selects the correspondent data.
• Demonstration at PPM: PPM has had several demonstrations with regular police officers, system administrators and data analysts. The outcomes have been two reports focusing on the strengths and the usability of the platform. The criticism included in the reports was taken up by developers as could be seen in the first training webinar. A sign for us that cooperation with the technical partners works and that our feedback can help to make the platform more beneficial for our daily work. More testing opportunities for our officers are soon to come.
• Demonstration at WSPol: WSPol seemed to appreciate the Video and image processing component. They proposed to add a possibility, apart from its recognition, to locate the object on the map automatically (based on imported text, GPS data, CCTV data) at any time later on.
• Demonstration at PSNI: The PSNI highlighted that the platform was easy to use and followed a logical and clear pathway from data upload, through the analysis process to the final fusion and visualization of results. We successfully tested the text mining tool within our demonstration which identified a significant saving on time and resources. This would have a measurable impact on our ability to improve our response to large or complicated investigations. The PSNI have shown a great interest in a number of new tools that we believe will assist Investigators provide robust Court proof evidence and ultimately enhance our ability to safeguard the public.

December 21,  2020: We are in the main test phase.

We are in the main test phase. MAGNETO LEA partners are testing the MAGNETO platform from their own premises to respect data privacy and security and prove that MAGNETO platform is integrated in LEAs’ processes.

March 19,  2020: Version 1.0

The MAGNETO technical partners are currently finalizing the first version of the MAGNETO platform to be delivered to LEAs.