Highlights from ROXANNE's first Field Test

Highlights from ROXANNE's first Field Test

On the 30th of September 2020, we successfully conducted the first field test of ROXANNE. This field test was first of a three series Field Test events which will be held during the three-year lifetime of the project spanning from September 2019 to August 2022. This event was attended by more than 90 individuals, bringing together representatives from the law enforcement, technology experts, policymakers, and research community from all over Europe.

ROXANNE is a novel platform combining advanced speech, language and video technologies along with criminal network analysis to support investigators in their daily work especially related to big criminal cases. This platform aims at speeding up the investigative processes, as well as reducing the cost and burden on the society owing to organized criminal activities.

 

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On the 30th of September 2020, we successfully conducted the first field test of ROXANNE. This field test was first of a three series Field Test events which will be held during the three-year lifetime of the project spanning from September 2019 to August 2022.  Given the restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we could not conduct the pilot even physically as intended originally. As a result, KEMEA provided the required virtual infrastructure to ensure smooth execution of the event virtually.

The demonstration of the first version of the ROXANNE platform’s capabilities started with an overall presentation of all the technologies and how they could be used in a specific scenario based on anti-drug policing. These technologies included voice processing, text processing, and a preliminary network analysis. The said scenario was based on a sample casework provided by police of CZECH Republic and the ROXANNE platform was presented on the server hosted by AIRBUS. Further, the platform has been developed by the technical partners of ROXANNE project integrated and supported by a forensic visualization toolkit.

 

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This event was attended by more than 90 individuals, bringing together representatives from the law enforcement, technology experts, policymakers, and research community from all over Europe. Participants were also shown the online educational platform, namely Moodle, created by ADDITESS and hosted on KEMEA’s servers, which would provide all the future users with targeted and effective training, both theoretical and practical, for the effective use of the ROXANNE platform. The audience was very excited for the event and would be providing feedback on the platform including, where possible, participating in its continuous testing and evaluation activities.

After the demonstration, expert stakeholders were involved in discussions based on ethical and legal issues along with the all the participants. This discussion highlighted relevant standards for responsible research and development as well as the ethical, legal, and societal aspects of the identified aspects consolidated during the project. Towards the end, the participants were asked to fill in a short evaluation questionnaire which would be used for the effective realization of the remaining field tests.

Overall, the event was a big success and the participants were able to appreciate the potential of the ROXANNE platform which is still getting better day by day. We are confident that such participation would help us to develop this platform in a way which is most effective for end-users while taking care of all the aspects of this project.