Special Session 10

AI-Powered Crime Detection and Prevention: Bridging Technology and Law Enforcement.

In recent years, the digital transformation has profoundly transformed the criminal landscape. The rise of the internet and social media platforms has empowered both organized crime and individual offenders, enabling them to leverage the latter for illicit activities. This shift presents significant challenges for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs), demanding a fundamental re-evaluation of their investigative and operational strategies.

While technological solutions for investigations and global cooperation do exist, they are mostly fragmented and myopic focusing on providing very narrow and isolated functions within their own boundaries without ensuring interoperability and international cooperation. In addition to this, criminals are increasingly exploiting digital technologies for a wide range of offenses, from traditional crimes facilitated by online tools (e.g., misinformation, deepfakes for identity fraud, etc.) to sophisticated cybercrimes. This necessitates the adoption of innovative approaches to detect, prevent, and apprehend offenders operating in this evolving digital ecosystem.

The proposed workshop aims to convene a diverse community of researchers from academia, industry, government, and LEAs. This interdisciplinary forum will serve as a landscape to:

• Showcase cutting-edge research: Present the latest advancements in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and analytics for crime and terrorism detection and prevention.
• Foster collaboration: Facilitate the exchange of ideas and best practices among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
• Address critical challenges: Explore innovative solutions to address the evolving threats posed by cybercrime and the exploitation of digital technologies for criminal purposes.
• Highlight the role of A and emerging technologies: Discuss the potential of data analytics, machine learning, and other advanced technologies to enhance LEA capabilities in the fight against crime.

The EEITE 2025 Conference is an international forum where leading experts, researchers, and practitioners will come together to share their latest findings, engage in vibrant discussions, and forge collaborations that will propel the field of Electronic Engineering forward.

Complementarity with the Conference: This workshop is directly aligned with the themes of the EEITE 2025 Conference, as it delves into the application of AI, Big Data and Machine Learning to derive analytics for disruptive civilian applications and towards fighting crime to protect citizens and societies.

By emphasizing applied solutions and real-world applications in fighting physical and digital crimes, “AI-Powered Crime Detection and Prevention: Bridging Technology and Law Enforcement” special session complements the conference’s broader focus on theoretical advancements by showcasing practical implementations and use cases in civilian applications. Furthermore, this special session will be supported by the Horizon Europe-funded projects AVALANCHE (GA: 101168393), TENSOR (GA: 101073920), PRESERVE (GA: 101168309) and the Research and Innovation Foundation-funded CYGNUS project (GA: DUAL USE/0922/0024) and actively disseminated by all consortium members to ensure the widest possible impact of the research presented.

AVALANCHE aims to make transformative steps towards the development of a highly innovative, holistic, multi-disciplinary, high-tech, and versatile solution for significantly increasing/broadening the operational capabilities of LEAs in their struggle to detect, analyse, track, investigate, and prevent cross-border illicit activities of high-risk criminal networks, terrorism, deep fakes, disinformation, cyber and intellectual property crime coordinated through the digital world.

TENSOR develops an advanced multi-modal biometric identification system designed to enhance the capabilities of LEAs in identifying suspects and combating crime and terrorism. At its core, the platform allows LEAs to integrate a wide range of biometric modalities, combining traditional methods such as fingerprints and facial recognition with emerging technologies in behavioural biometrics, such as gait and keystroke dynamics. By efficiently fusing these diverse biometric traits, TENSOR offers a robust and versatile solution for more accurate and reliable suspect identification.

PRESERVE develops an innovative and privacy-preserving decision-support system for EU LEAs, leveraging advanced Big Data and AI technologies to effectively combat crimes and terrorism. The envisioned PRESERVE system integrates Federated Learning, User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA), and other Big Data and AI techniques to monitor social network data, deep and shallow web information, and police databases in a secure, collaborative, privacy-aware, and ethical manner. The primary objective is to help LEA fight cybercrime and terrorism by identifying key communities and users involved in activities such as hate speech, child sexual abuse, terrorism, or drug trafficking and to use this information to better allocate police resources.

CYGNUS develops a bouquet of big data and AI services that put the human-in-the-loop to support civilian applications, detect entities and patterns, and reduce the analysis load performed by human operators through scalable big data processing and Explainable AI (XAI) methods.

FERMI exploits a holistic and cross-disciplinary methodology towards a framework that will thoroughly analyse disinformation and fake news and their sources, in combination with all the socioeconomic factors that may affect both the spreading of such incidents and their effects on multiple dimensions of society. Comprising a set of innovative technological developments, FERMI will facilitate EU Police Authorities to detect and monitor the way that disinformation and fake news spread.

Key Enhancements:

• Stronger opening: Emphasizes the transformative impact of the digital revolution on the criminal landscape.
• Focus on key takeaways: Introduction of impactful and emerging technologies and solutions for SMEs and LEAs for fighting crime and terrorism.
• Transformative solutions and significance: Explicitly mentioned methodologies, algorithms, tools, and solutions extending the State-of-the-Art (SotA) in fighting crime and terrorism.