January was a busy month for the EU H2020 funded project PROACTIVE (PReparedness against CBRNE threats through cOmmon Approaches between security praCTItioners and the VulnerablE civil society) coordinated by the UIC Security Division.
The project held its second Progress Meeting from 14 – 16 January 2020, in London. So far, the technical work packages are progressing well with promising outcomes foreseen for the railway business. The first scientific results were delivered in December 2019 and can be found on the project website. The consortium meeting was followed by a workshop with project eNOTICE and external guests, which aimed to prepare the first field exercise scheduled for 28 October 2020 in Rieti, Italy. The multidisciplinary exercise will be based on a scenario of a terrorist attack using a chemical agent on the railway premises.
Furthermore, on 10 January 2020, the PROACTIVE team was invited to attend the Workshop on data in the Fight against Crime and Terrorism (FCT) projects in Brussels. The workshop brought together approx. 100 representatives of around 30 on-going projects. PROACTIVE presented how data will be used in the two toolkits being developed by the project, as well as how PROACTIVE will handle the ethical issues related to data in security research projects. A main takeaway from this workshop is that research data is still a major issue and we are all doing our best to meet the high ethical standards set by the European Commission, but as of yet there is no fool-proof answer on how to tackle these issues.
Finally, on 30 January 2020, PROACTIVE was invited to join the first “Project to Policy Kick-Off Seminar” (P2PKOS) at the Research Executive Agency (REA) premises in Brussels. The event was meant to help projects understand the Commission’s expectations in terms of policy recommendations and to produce research outputs which are tailor-made to the Commission policy needs. It was a very good exercise in the effort of bringing EU funded research closer to policy and encouraging projects to cooperate more. Grigore Havarneanu presented the project and answered questions from Policy Officers representing various EU policy-making units such as DG Home, Police cooperation unit, Counterterrorism unit, Cybercrime unit, Organised crime unit, CEPOL, and EUROPOL. This seminar is likely to be organised every January from now on for newly funded security-related projects.
The PROACTIVE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 832981.
PROACTIVE can be followed on Twitter (@PROACTIVE_EU) as well as on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/proactive-eu/) and the project website https://proactive-h2020.eu/.
