The REACTION consortium team is consisted of eight partners across two EU countries (Greece, Cyprus).
Coordinator
Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum / Directorate General of Informatics and Communications
Τhe Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum (HMMA) is responsible for planning and implementation of National Migration policy regarding the legal entry, residence and social integration of third countries nationals to Greek territory as well the reception & identification and temporary residence of third country nationals without the necessary documentation, planning and implementation of the National Policy for International Protection etc.
HMMA is implementing IT projects under EU Funding Programmes such as “REA”, KENTAVROS” and “YPERION”. The three systems concern the digitalization of the Ministry and mainly Reception and Identification Services (in RICs and Fylakio-Evros). REA will upgrade the quality of internet communication of Reception and Identification Services and the quality of the internet that is provided to TCNs that reside in Reception Facilities. KENTAVROS enforces the management of the electronic and national safety supporting cybersecurity targeting to the protection of human life and reception facilities. Ιt includes closed circuit television, signal reception center and incidents’ management center of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum. YPERION aims at the control of the access and the monitoring of the benefits that are provided to the refugees and migrants that stay at the temporary residence facilities. Τhis implies a reliable entry-exit system at the Facilities with card and fingerprint.
Partners
Hellenic Ministry of Citizen Protection /
European and Development Programmes Agency (YDEAP)
The European and Development Programmes Agency (YDEAP) of the Ministry of Citizen Protection, established in 2011, is responsible for the management of European and Development funding programmes of the aforementioned Ministry, as well as the coordination of the relevant Services of the Ministry (e.g. Hellenic Police and National Coordination Centre for Border Control, Immigration and Asylum), with a view to implement successfully the above-mentioned programmes. The Agency ISO 9001:2015 certified. During the period 2011 – 2013, YDEAP was appointed as Responsible Authority in Greece for the European External Borders Fund (Decision No 574/2007/EC – 23/05/2007) and European Return Fund (Decision No. 575/2007/EC – 23/05/2007), in the framework of the General Program «Solidarity and Management of Migration Flows». Currently, YDEAP is acting as Delegated Authority of the Internal Security Fund (Decision No 515/2014/EC and 513/2014/EC) and the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund – Return Pillar (Decision No 516/2014/EC). Furthermore, YDEAP is currently managing Programme G of the «Asylum and Migration» sector of EEA Grants 2014-2021. YDEAP has also participated in several EU funded projects (ISF emergency assistance, Union Actions and Horizon 2020). More specifically, the Agency is the coordinator of the project “CERETAB”, the innovative platform of which will be used in REACTION. Lastly, YDEAP is responsible, on behalf of the Ministry of Citizen Protection, for submitting funding proposals in the framework of IBMF/BMVI, ISF and AMIF, for the financing period2021-2027. YDEAP is participating in this action in cooperation and representing Hellenic Police (HP). The Hellenic Police force consists of police officers, public servants, special guards and border guards.
Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH)
The Centre for Research and Technology-Hellas (CERTH), founded in 2000, is the only research centre in Northern Greece and one of the largest in the country. CERTH has important scientific and technological achievements in many areas including: Energy, Environment, Industry, Mechatronics, Information & Communication, Transportation & Sustainable Mobility, Health, Agro-biotechnology, Smart farming, Safety & Security, as well as several cross-disciplinary scientific areas. CERTH is essentially a self-supported Research Centre generating an average annual turnover of ~€ 22 Million coming from: (a) >30% from bilateral industrial research contracts, (b) >60% from competitive research projects, (c) <10% as government institutional funding. More than 600 people work at CERTH with the majority being scientists. CERTH has received numerous awards and distinctions such as the European Descartes Prize, the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, Microsoft International Contest Prize, the Trading Agents Competition Award and many more and is listed among the Top-20 of the EU’s Research Centres with the highest participation in FP7 competitive research grants. CERTH has participated successfully in more than 1.000 competitive research projects (with a total budget exceeding 423 M€ and involving more than 1.100 international partner organizations) financed by the European Union (EU), leading industries from USA, Japan and Europe and the Greek Government via the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT). Currently, CERTH includes the following five institutes: (a) Chemical Process & Energy Resources Institute (CPERI), (b) Information Technologies Institute (ITI), (c) Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT), (d) Institute of Applied Biosciences (INAB), (e) Institute for Research and Technology Thessaly (IRETETH).
More specific for the REACTION’s objectives, the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) exhibits substantial research activity, both basic and industry-oriented, as well as technology transfer actions, in the area of analysis, modelling, simulation and prediction of complex N-dimensional data, occupancy detection, dynamic background modelling and handling, occupancy tracking, occupancy and energy modelling, occupancy simulation and prediction, visual analytics techniques for analyzing environmental disasters and crisis management at both early design and operational phases and algorithms for decision support systems. Two distinct research groups from ITI will be involved in the REACTION project to fulfill the latter’s objectives, (i) Multimodal Data fusion and Analytics Group (M4D) of MKLAB and (ii) ConvCAO R&D Group.
- M4D, as part of the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Data Analytics Laboratory (MKLab), comprises one of the two R&D groups that will be involved in the project. The team has authored over 40 publications in scientific journals and 200 in international conferences and over 15 book chapters. Additionally, the team has significant experience and scientific expertise on Computer vision, Image and Video analysis, Robotics, Social media Monitoring and Social Network Analysis, Web Multimedia Mining, Image and Video Analysis, Multimedia Understanding, Interactive Multimedia Search and Knowledge Retrieval, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence (including Machine Learning and Deep Learning) etc. The aforementioned experience was gained through its leading role in over 60 relevant projects. Specifically, M4D/ITI-CERTH has coordinated H2020-SEC–BES ROBORDER, H2020 SEC-DRS beAWARE, H2020 SU-DRS aqua3S and H2020-SEC-FCT CONNEXIONs. Additionally, the team has been the Scientific and Technical Manager in numerous projects such as H2020-SU-BES03 NESTOR, H2020-SU-BES ISOLA and H2020-SU-INFRA 7SHIELD, H2020 SU-FCT CREST and H2020-SU-FCT PREVISION. Moreover, it has participated with leading roles in H2020-SU-BES ARESIBO and H2020 LC-EEB-08-2020 ASHVIN. The complete list of M4D projects is available online: https://m4d.iti.gr/project/. The results of aforementioned European projects are also exploited through the lab’s spin-off companies Infalia (www.infalia.com) and Carealia (http://www.carealia.gr).
- The second CERTH/ITI involved research team, namely ConvCAO (www.convcao.com), employs a high-quality scientific group of personnel possessing great expertise in topics related to intelligent management and control in large-scale, complex, heterogeneous, synergetic Internet of Things (IoT) for maximized operational performance levels. The research team of Prof. Elias Kosmatopoulos (ConvCAO) has coordinated the FP7 ICT project AGILE (on reconfigurable/self-tuneable control of large complex systems), FP7 PEBBLE (on control and optimization of positive-energy buildings) and H2020 PLUG-N-HARVEST (Plug-n-play passive and active multi-modal energy Harvesting systems, circular economy by design, with high replicability for Self-sufficient Districts & Near-Zero Buildings), whereas optimization and control actions algorithms have been developed in NOPTILUS FP7 project (Swarms of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles), RAWFIE H2020 project (Road-, Air-, and Water- based Future Internet Experimentation), and sFLY FP7 (Swarm of Micro Flying Robots). Moreover, ConvCAO group has worked on Systems-of-Systems intelligent management and has already coordinated another FP7 project – namely LOCAL4GLOBAL on Systems-of-Systems Optimal Control – where a plug-n-play fully scalable self-adjusting tool tailored for building blocks (districts) was developed.
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence
of the University of Cyprus (KIOS-UCY)
KIOS-UCY is the largest research and innovation center in Cyprus on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) with an emphasis on monitoring, control, management, and security of critical infrastructures. Its research team specializes in intelligent systems and control, distributed systems and algorithms, graph theory and optimization, computational intelligence, fault diagnosis and fault tolerance, and embedded systems, in an attempt to provide holistic and viable solutions for a variety of mission-critical applications. The Center has a proven track record in managing multidisciplinary research projects funded either by the EU through Horizon 2020 and other Calls for Proposals (including DG ECHO), the National Research Promotion Foundation, and other national projects funded by the structural funds. It has successfully coordinated transnational research projects funded by the Horizon 2020, FP7, ESF COST Action, DG ECHO, DG HOME, DG MARE, and an ERC Advanced Grant. In 2017 KIOS was selected by the EU to be upgraded to a European Research and Innovation Center of Excellence through the EU’s strategic Horizon 2020 program for “Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation – Teaming.” Imperial College London is the Center’s partner in this endeavor with the aim of transferring best practices in research and innovation within KIOS. This provides the ideal environment to support the implementation of this project, enabling the researcher access to the appropriate expertise and research support.
KIOS-UCY hosts dedicated research infrastructures and systems investigating different aspects of monitoring, control and security of critical infrastructures using cutting-edge equipment for experimental evaluation, testing and prototyping. In addition, KIOS-UCY develops state of the art tools and methodologies for emergency response management, monitoring and inspection of critical infrastructures through the utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), sensors and robotics technologies. Indicatively, KIOS-UCY RPAS facility consists of a range of state-of-the-art multi-rotor and fixed-wing platforms and payloads totaling more than 50,000 Euros, including 4 DJI M100 developer platforms with 4K cameras and 1 thermal camera, 1 DJI M210 and 1 DJI M210 DRTK platforms, 30x zoom 4K camera, and smaller units for indoor applications, including 4 DJI Spark and 2 DJI Mavic. These technologies are used for the development of intelligent functionalities, including automated path-planning, real-time image analysis, object detection and coordination architectures for multi-drone systems that ensure scalable and robust operations. The key benefits of such systems include the enhancement of public safety, improvement of CIS efficiency, safety of operations and hazards avoidance, reduction of person-hours and costs.
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA)
The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) was founded in 1837. NKUA was the first university in the newly established modern Greek state, as well as in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean region and had a significant role for the production of knowledge and culture in the country. Since then it has been an internationally competitive, globally-focused, research-led university. Today NKUA is the largest public institution of higher education in Greece, and among the largest universities in Europe. The Department of Informatics and Telecommunications was established in 1989 and consists of three divisions: Computer Science; Computer Systems and Applications; Telecommunications and Signal Processing. The Department has about 40 faculty members and over 200 M.Sc. and Ph.D. students. Since its establishment, research and innovation are priorities for the Department’s faculty and researchers. NKUA will participate in the REACTION project through the Network Technologies Services and Applications (NeTSA) Lab. NeTSA was legally established in 2016 within the NKUA. NeTSA staff comprises several acknowledged researchers and engineers specializing in the fields of telecommunications, data networks, security, multimedia applications, distributed, mobile and pervasive systems. During the past years, NeTSA has been actively involved in many international projects, funded mainly by the European Commission, as well as national projects, funded by Greek Ministries or other research agencies. NETSA has been coordinating the H2020 FIRE+ project RAWFIE (Road-, Air- and Water-based Future Internet Experimentation), technically coordinating the H2020 Security project ARESIBO (Augmented Reality Enriched SItuation awareness for BOrder security) and coordinating the EO4EU (AI-augmented ecosystem for Earth Observation data accessibility with Extended reality User Interfaces for Service and data exploitation) Horizon Europe project. NKUA is acting as the technical facilitator in the RAWFIE pan-european federation of testbeds where experimentation on sensors and control schemes can be realized using all types of robotic assets (UxV, v=Aerial, Ground, Surface).
University of West Attica (UWA)
The University of West Attica (UWA) (https://www.uniwa.gr/en/) is the 3rd largest Higher Education Institute (HEI) in Greece. Over 50,000 students attend undergraduate and postgraduate programmes provided by 27 Departments and taught by teaching staff committed to maintaining the highest standards in education. UWA applies EN ISO 9001:2008, and its academic units have successfully undergone external international evaluation organized by the Hellenic Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (HQAA). Following the core philosophy of both its mission and vision, UWA focuses on creating added value through actions that address the following areas:
- provision of high-level educational services,
- conduct original scientific research,
- diffusion of “know-how” and best practices,
- production and dissemination of scientific knowledge,
- development of active synergies between society, the labor market and academia.
UWA is currently acting as the coordinating organization of the “ICT for Learning, Education and Training” committee of the Hellenic Standardization Organization (ELOT) and represents Greece to numerous European standardization activities, such as the CEN Technical Committees 353 and 428. Among others it has been the coordinating organization for the production of the European Learner Mobility (ELM) Achievement Information (15981 EuroLMAI) European Norm and a key contributor to the 15982 Metadata for Learning Opportunities (MLO) European Norm.
UWA aims to put into the service of the proposed project a highly qualified institutional entity, perfectly matching the project’s concept and foreseen activities, namely the Department of Informatics and Computer Engineering (ICE) (http://www.ice.uniwa.gr/en/home/), having as main objectives (i) the provision of quality IT tools and applications responding to the needs of the market and of the society for
qualified professionals with high-level knowledge, skills and experience in Information Technology, as well as in Communications, and (ii) the realization of significant research and development in all core areas of Informatics and Computer Science & Technology, and (iii) the design and development of adaptive, intelligent systems and environments for technology-enhanced trainings.
The Department of Informatics has at its possession 8 educational and 8 research laboratories with cutting-edge equipment and high-speed networking infrastructure, 28 professors of various ranks, and nearly 50 laboratory and scientific fellows. Its key researchers’ expertise involves research aspects highly relevant to the project: design, development and reuse of knowledge resources, design of open practices and environments, methodologies and IT instruments for enhancing situational awareness and mobility; modeling and use of linked open data technologies; capacity building. Overall, UWA has a strong profile in establishing collaborative relationships with academic/industrial partners at regional, national and European level.
Center for Security Studies (Kentro Meleton Asfaleias – KEMEA)
The Center for Security Studies (Kentro Meleton Asfaleias – KEMEA), founded in 2005 by Law 3387, is a scientific, consulting and research organization overseen by the Minister of Citizen Protection, governed by common law and annually audited by chartered accountants. Its principal purpose is to conduct theoretical and applied research and studies, particularly at strategic level, on security topics and policies. Moreover, it is the think-tank of the Ministry of Citizen Protection on numerous policies such as public order, correctional services, terrorism prevention, crime prevention, integrated border management and civil protection as well as on various other security and societal issues; it also provides advisory and consulting risk-management services to an array of public and private organizations.
Currently, KEMEA employs one hundred and seventy-five (175) scientific and research associates with a broad range of high-calibre academic backgrounds and professional expertise. Of them, forty-four (44) are in active service at the domestic law enforcement, civil protection and defense agencies.
To meet the growing needs of the security and law enforcement practitioners and related academia, KEMEA has participated in research projects of the Horizon 2020 – the Research and Innovation Framework Programme of the European Commission – ever since it was launched; part of the H2020 is devoted to “Secure Societies – Protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens”. KEMEA’s objective in this context, is not only the development of new technologies or the application of emerging technologies, but also the understanding of associated phenomena and the development of more effective policies.
By virtue of its afore mentioned achievements and owing to the fact that in 2022 alone it is participating in overall 90 EU-funded research projects, ranging from Border & External Security, Fight against Crime & Terrorism, Disaster Resilient Societies, Cyber- & Digital-Security to Critical Infrastructure Protection, ISF-Police, ISF-Borders, Interreg, Erasmus, Justice, Anti-trafficking, etc. KEMEA is considered a key player in the EU Research, Development and Innovation community.
Moreover, pursuant to the provisions of Council Directive 2008/114/EC on the identification and designation of European critical infrastructures and the assessment of the need to improve their protection, and by a Presidential Decree of 2011 (Nr. 39 of 6.5.2011) KEMEA is the nationally designated European Critical Infrastructure Protection (ECIP) Contact Point, responsible to coordinate ECIP issues domestically, as well as with other Member States and the European Commission.
Finally, KEMEA is represented and participates actively in the deliberations of the governing bodies of EOS, ECSO, EARTO, ESDC; it has been also a CEPOL partner since 2016 and, since 2019 the designated focal point between the Hellenic Police and the European Border & Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) on Research and Innovation matters.
Cyprus Police (CP)
Cyprus Police was created according to Art.130 of the Republic of Cyprus constitution of 1960.The constitution describes “POLICE” for the urban areas and “GENDARMERIES” for the rural. The two forces were joined to form the present law enforcement service in 1964, named Cyprus Police Force but since Law 73(I) 2004 the legal name has changed to Cyprus Police.
Cyprus Police operates under the supervision of the Minister of Justice and Public Order and is responsible for wide range of duties, according to Article 6, for the maintenance of law and order, the preservation of peace, the prevention and detection of crime and the apprehension of offenders all in line with preserving the citizens’ rights. Currently Cyprus Police follows the Chief’s strategic mission which is designed to encourage and improve police relations with the citizens, with the view of reducing crime and safeguarding human rights.
Cyprus Police is the south-eastern Mediterranean safe keeper of the European Union, with the duty to block criminals and any other illegal activity to enter and travel in EU soil. By combating criminality, battle cross-border crime and combating fraud in CY prevents illegal activities from spreading to the EU. Cyprus Police comprises of several departments which are dealing with preventing and combating crime in all forms and are working to fulfil the goals set by the European Commission and Council conclusions.
The Port and Marine Police will be directly involved with the project. Their mission is:
- Patrolling in the territorial waters of cyprus providing law enforcement under national and international law and conventions.
- Providing assistance during emergency cases at sea (pollution occurrences, sar situations and other).
- Providing safety of ports/anchorages and airports of the republic of cyprus against terrorist acts and illegal activities.
- Escorts of vessels & personnel of high risk
- Patrolling the shores providing protection for the swimmers during the summer season.
- Performing special operations and other police duties at sea.