ANITA aims at improving investigation capabilities of LEAs by delivering a set of tools and techniques to efficiently address online illegal trafficking of counterfeit/falsified medicines, NPS, drugs, and weapons.

ANITA will design and develop an innovative knowledge-based user-centered cognitive investigation system for analysing heterogeneous (text, audio, video and image) online (Surface Web, Deep Web, Dark Nets) and offline (LEAs’ databases) resources for fighting illegal trafficking activities through an elegant combination of:

– avant-garde data source analysis and blockchain technologies for the analysis of crypto-currency network and transactions (supporting the cases of Surface Web, Deep Web and Dark Nets);

– advanced Big Data analytics tools for the automatic extraction and analysis of the vast amounts of multimodal multimedia content contained in the identified sources;

– sophisticated methodologies for capturing, modelling, inferring, processing and storing knowledge in human understandable forms (e.g. expressive high-level semantic ontologies), including the case of connecting the connectionist learning paradigm with the symbolic learning one (i.e. extracting relevant and new knowledge from neural networks and formally storing it in the form of ontologies);

– the development of a sophisticated, adaptive, cognitive user modelling framework that will capture, analyse, interpret, mimic and integrate key human cognitive and information processing functions

– domain-related and user-oriented intelligence applications, able to provide users with interactive dashboards to explore, reconstruct and identify patterns for spatial, temporal and causal correlations among illegal trafficking events, entities and activities and to support decision-making processes for countermeasures to undertake.

RISSC is leading  the criminological analysis aiming at exploring different aspects of the online trafficking of illicit goods, namely, falsified medicines, New Psychoactive Substance (NPS) and illicit drugs (Use Case 1), as well as firearms and weapons (Use Case 2). It considers both the surface and the deep-dark Web, and takes into consideration the connections with the same illicit phenomena taking place offline. The analysis also investigates the online financing of terrorist groups and activities (Use Case 3), while also looking at the possible connections between the financing activities and the illicit trafficking on the Internet.

The main objective of the criminological analysis concerns the improvement of the operational knowledge on the different phenomena and their cross-cutting elements, and at the same time the provision, to the technological partners involved in ANITA, of practical inputs for the development of the technical tools.