The EU funded ASGARD (Analysis System for Gathered Raw Data) project, which ran from 1 September 2016 to 30 November 2020, received the 2022 Collaborative Innovative Technology Award in a ceremony held in Brussels, Belgium on 5 October 2022. The prize was presented by the European Commision´s Community for European Research and Innovation for Security (CERIS), a platform that works to facilitate interactions within the security research community and users of research outputs.
The ASGARD project´s main objective was to enhance law enforcement agencies´ efficiency and capabilities in forensic, intelligence, and foresight by delivering a set of easily configurable and deployable tools and applications. To do this, they developed tools that can process and analyze text, images, audio from multiple online sources.
Researchers from the Computer Applications in Science and Engineering Department (CASE) of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) contributed to ASGARD by developing the internet-forum-profile-text-analyser (IFPTA), an online text mining and natural language processing tool that filters huge amounts of text in order to gather data that are relevant to profile users of internet fora. This tool is useful for analyzing information that can have a predictive value such as users' opinions, bioinformation, as well as events fora users participate in.
“The IFPTA has been proven to work effectively in detecting fora threads that can be linked to cyber offenses. We have presented this tool to law enforcement agencies such as Europol and we have had very positive feedback from them,” said Joaquim Moré, the lead natural language processing researcher from BSC who is involved in ASGARD. “We are very happy that the IFPTA, along with the many tools developed by consortium partners, contributed to helping ASGARD win this Collaborative Innovative Technology Award.”