POP-ART, coordinated by ETRA Investigación y Desarrollo, is a project with the strategic goal of enhancing EU citizens’ security against threats and attacks in public spaces and mass gatherings. To achieve this, POP-ART will combine a technical, regulatory, and societal approach, under a public-private perspective, to deliver tools that provide a coordinated and effective action towards preventing/ deterring/ mitigating security threats and attacks.

The technical solution is based on a platform that enables secure processing and sharing of large amounts of data collected in real time, including Big Data analysis and machine learning techniques for image and audio processing from different sources.

POP-ART platform provides information about the situations occurring at the event, allowing the identification of violent scenes or suspicious activities. As a result, different types of alerts and guidance can be sent to the deployed agents and authorities involved in the security of the public space. To ensure accuracy in the use of the platform, security awareness campaigns will be deployed, as well as practical training sessions, provided by EUC-CERIDES (Centre of Excellence in Risk and Decision Making).

This platform will be integrated into the existing systems of Spanish National Police (PN) to enhance their capabilities and accelerate the learning process. In addition, an Associated LEA (Portuguese Policia Judiciária) will actively contribute to POP-ART activities in order to have the necessary expertise for a possible future integration of the platform with their own system.

These tools will be based in the previous H2020 project LETS-CROWD (Law Enforcement agencies human factor methods and Toolkit for the Security and protection of CROWDs in mass gatherings) that has been featured several times by the EC as a success story, including DG HOME’s Protection of Public Spaces newsletter.