The goal of security research is to develop innovative solutions able to assist Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) in their everyday tasks, to increase the citizens’ feeling of security while maintaining a good balance between security and freedom. Focus areas include but are not limited to protecting critical infrastructures and reacting to natural and man-made disasters, preventing and investigating organized crime and terrorism, improving border security, digital security, privacy and data protection.

Research in these areas includes the development of new technologies and products to meet the needs of security practitioners, and requires understanding of phenomena such as violent radicalization and the development of more effective policies and interventions. Success in security research depends on interdisciplinary projects, knowledge transfer to the general public, social science research on data protection and ethics and transparency.

VCL has been a key-role partner in several security projects, conducting research and development of novel and efficient security technologies. More specifically, VCL’s goal is to offer:

• New technologies and tools for automated analysis of digital forensic data in the context of criminal investigations.
• New solutions for supporting the work of LEAs in managing Big Data, i.e. extracting, storing, indexing large amounts of structured and unstructured data.
• Novel deep machine learning approaches for detection and understanding of criminal events by exploiting data from heterogeneous sources such as video surveillance, confiscated devices, social media as well as the Surface and the Deep Web, including the Dark Nets.
• Cost-effective solutions for processing and fusion of multimodal sensor data to assist in early detection of ground or aerial threats.
• Intuitive, user-friendly tools to facilitate collaborative work of criminal investigators.