On October 24-25, CounteR Project participated in the Security Research Event (SRE) – SRE2023 in Brussels, hosted by the European Commission’s DG Home Affairs. SRE is the annual meeting of industry, governments, and knowledge institutions to discuss security in Europe. A number of EU-funded project were in attendance, namely through EU’s Horizon Program and the Internal Security Fund.
CounteR was represented with a stand at the exhibition jointly with the INDEED project. Experts from AST and EI attended the event on behalf of the CounteR Consortium.
“This was an opportunity to meet with colleagues from across the ecosystem and EU-funded sibling projects”, EI’s Apostol Apostolov from EI commented. “We were thrilled to attend the event’s panels, which were very insightful; and we also had the change to disseminate CounteR’s new brochure to interested stakeholders at our stand during the exhibition”, Adrian Onu from AST added.
The introductory roundtable discussed a new paradigm for security research:
- Police officers are not involved in research, but more focused on daily problems. Participants talked about what LEAs could do to tackle the new challenges;
- Research agenda with priorities – disaster risk has escalation potential – pandemics, antibiotics resistance, radiation, environmental damage due to conflicts;
- Our worlds are converging: we must find out how to work in colliding impacts of climate, financial crisis, digitalization, rapid development of political movements;
- To be successful, SR actors must use common language and be on the same track with endusers, academia, and tech;
- Speakers included experts from Frontex, Spanish Association of Defense Security, Aeronautics and Space Technologies, UNDRR, Netherlands police and many others.
The panel on the level of preparedness to respond to CBRN disasters contained the following highlights:
- Citizens need practical exercises and simulations;
- Higher public awareness is needed on disasters caused by climate change;
- Rapid info sharing and tighter control on trade is essential in health crises;
- Security sector should open up to the other spheres of science to tackle combined attacks jointly;
- Intelligence & prevention should be enhanced.
Participants in the panel on digitalization of society – threats and responses – shared the following points:
- The key skill needed for navigating security is navigation disruption. Cybercrimes affect many victims in a very short time. EU projects in this domain should focus more on policy change;
- To be impactful, research should focus on the four Cs: Communication, Content, Connectivity, and Collaboration;
- The role of the research community is to bridge all actors in the security ecosystem – LEAs, society, technological companies;
- Today, research products developed under Horizon Europe projects are much better and more useful than in the past, and enable us to face new types of crimes.
