Gradiant Leads the European PRESERVE Project to Enhance Public Safety with AI while Safeguarding Citizen Privacy

We are excited to announce the launch of the collaborative Horizon Europe PRESERVE project, coordinated by Gradiant and involving 14 partners from 9 countries

PRESERVE (Ethical and Privacy-preserving Big Data platform for Supporting Criminal Investigations) officially kicks-off today in Vigo to demonstrate, over the next 3 years, how innovation can enhance public safety through AI while respecting citizens’ privacy

PRESERVE aims to improve the allocation of police resources, enhance proactive threat detection and response, and provide a regulatory-compliant model for the responsible use of AI in crime detection and prevention.

With nearly 6 million euros of funding under the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme, this alliance represents a significant advancement in how Law Enforcement Authorities (LEAs) can use technology to improve cross-border collaboration and decision-making while adhering to the ethical and legal standards of the European Union.

The initiative intends to design, implement, and validate an advanced set of tools that allows security authorities to collaborate more effectively and securely without compromising citizens’ privacy. PRESERVE will use Federated Learning technologies to enable AI models to be trained in a decentralized manner, without requiring data to be shared between different entities. It will also utilise User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA) techniques to analyse user behaviour through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Over the next 36 months, the partners will develop a comprehensive solution to tackle critical challenges in public safety by efficiently and securely collecting and processing large amounts of data from various sources. The project will focus on preventing child sexual abuse and facilitating the identification and mitigation of hate speech through trend analysis and real-time monitoring. It will analyse radicalization risks and assess extremist activity using advanced tools, and will examine methods for detecting drug trafficking through advanced data correlation and trend analysis.

PRESERVE is composed of 14 partners from 9 countries: Gradiant (Coordinator), the Department of Security of the Basque Government (Ertzaintza), Paradigma Innovation, and Tree Technology (Spain); Risa Sicherheitsanalysen GmbH and Nuromedia GmbH (Germany); Ubitech Limited (Cyprus); Exus Software Monoprosopi Etairia and Kentro Meleton Asfaleias Center for Security Studies (Greece); Università Degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro (Italy); the Police of the Czech Republic (Czech Republic); Ministerul Afacerilor Interne (Romania); Föreningen Global Forum (Sweden); and the associate entity Bournemouth University (United Kingdom).

The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101168309