INVITATION TO JRC's RESEARCH CENTER AT ISPRA, ITALY.
17–18 September 2009
15 Eusja journalists are inviteted to visit the research institutes
at Ispra near Lago Maggiore.
The participants pay their travel to Milano-Malpensa airport. Other
costs are covered by JRC.
One of the core competences of the Institute for the Protection and
Security of the Citizen (IPSC) is in the field of information
technologies (ICT), in particular in satellite image processing and
analysis, open source information analysis and risk assessment.
More about research att Ispra at the bottom of this page.
Applications to be sent by E-mail to Viola Egikova, before 1
September 2009
Travel, accomodation and preliminary programme:
Arrival and transfer to Ispra
The closest airport to Ispra is Milan Malpensa (about 45 minutes by
car). Transfers can however also be arranged from other airports
(Linate or Orio al Serio/Bergamo).
Participants should plan their flights with arrival on Wednesday, 16th
September or early on Thursday morning, 17th September.
Transfers from the airport to the hotel will be organised according to
participants' arrival times.
Dinner on Wednesday evening depending on arrival times of participants
Accommodation
HOTEL LIDO ANGERA
Viale Libertà 11 - 21021 - Angera (VA)
Tel. +39 0331.93.02.32 / 93.06.56
Fax +39 0331.93.20.44
lido@hotellido.it
Please note that the room and breakfast will be paid directly by the
JRC, but all further costs are the responsibility of the participants
and you are kindly asked to settle these upon check-out.
Programme
Thursday, 17 September
08:50 Shuttle from hotel to JRC Ispra
please make sure to have your ID document for entrance to the JRC
09:15 Welcome and introduction to the activities of
the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC)
Stephan Lechner, Director IPSC
09:45 Multimodal Public Transport Safety (ECCAIRS –
European Centre for Collection and Assessment of Multimodal Transport
Safety Data))
10:45 Coffee break
11:15 European Laboratory for Structural Assessment –
ELSA ( HYPERLINK "http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/facility.php?id=elsa"
http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/facility.php?id=elsa) – Information
technology for assessment and protection of structures
13:00 Lunch – Piccola Mensa
14:30 Digital Tachograph and visit of the Thermal,
Electro-Magnetic, Physical Equipment Stress Testing (TEMPEST)
laboratory ( HYPERLINK
"http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/facility.php?id=tempest"
http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/facility.php?id=tempest)
15:30 Protection of Critical Networked Infrastructures
17:00 Transfer to the hotel
18:30 Departure by boat to the "Isola Superiore (or
Isola dei Pescatori)"
19:30 Dinner at Ristorante Unione, Isola dei
Pescatori ( HYPERLINK "http://www.isolapescatori.com"
www.isolapescatori.com)
22:30 Return by boat to the hotel
Friday, 18 September
08:30 Shuttle from hotel to JRC Ispra
Participants leaving in the evening are kindly asked to check out of
the hotel in time and take all their luggage
09:00 Open Source Text Information Mining and Analysis
10:30 Coffee break
10:45 Crisis management / Crisis room
12:30 Lunch at Piccola Mensa
13:45 Passport, Identity Management and Access
Control – practical demonstrations
15:00 Satellite image analysis applied to security
16:30 Conclusions and Q&A session with Stephan
Lechner, IPSC Director
17:15 Transfer to the airport (Please note that for
participants with earlier flights transfers will be arranged
accordingly with departure from JRC ca. 2 hours before flight departure)
Contacts
Berta Duane
Barbara Mortara
Press Officer
Communication officer
IPSC
berta.duane@ec.europa.eu
Barbara.mortara@ec.europa.eu
Office: +39 0332 789743
Office: + 39 0332 78 9511
Mobile: +39 348 6614019
Mobile: + 39 349 5785208
More about the research at Ispra:
ICT at IPSC
One of the core competences of the Institute for the Protection and
Security of the Citizen (IPSC) is in the field of information
technologies, in particular in satellite image processing and analysis,
open source information analysis, risk assessment.
The following is a selection of current activities and recent
achievements with an important IT component:
- SATELLITE IMAGE ANALYSIS
The institute expertise in the analysis of satellite images is applied
in several fields: security and crisis management (disaster reduction,
conflict prevention, crisis response and support to post-crisis
rehabilitation and reconstruction), agriculture (crop forecasts and
subsidies control), fisheries and maritime surveillance. The research
work of IPSC's scientists focuses in particular on methods for the
automatic image processing and information extraction.
Extraction of building parameters
One recent achievement is the development of a method for automatic
extraction of building parameters from satellite images.
IPSC developed, tested and validated methods for height derivation of
buildings and man-made structures from several sources, namely:
satellite and airborne Very High Resolution (VHR) and Synthetic
Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Human settlements' detection and analysis
have been widely developed. First, studying the urban post-conflict
change classification performance by spectral and structural features
in a support vector machine; secondly, defining and testing a robust
built-up area presence index by anisotropic rotation-invariant textural
measure; thirdly, improving detection and characterisation of urban
objects from VHR optical image data. This helped to develop a
methodology to quantify built-up structures from optical VHR imagery.
Further investigation was conducted on quantitative and qualitative
validation of digital surface models. A very practical result is the
estimation of velocity and direction of moving targets using a single
optical VHR satellite image. On the basis of a single image, the
process is remarkably simple, fast, effective and inexpensive. A
specific study addressed double bounce scattering mechanism of
buildings in polarimetric VHR SAR data.
- OPEN SOURCE INFORMATION ANALYSIS
IPSC works in the field of computer science and computational
linguistics, specifically in the domain of Internet technologies, and
information extraction and analysis in a multilingual environment, to
massive data sets, including open source.
Media Monitoring System
The main product in this area is a Media Monitoring system (EMM –
http://press.jrc.it). It monitors news media sources on the World Wide
Web from all around the world in multiple languages, classifies the
news, analyses the news using information extraction techniques,
aggregates the information, provides notifications depending on their
content and provides visual presentation of the information found. The
fact that this system monitors, in real time, 80.000 new news articles
per day from 2200 news web-sites world-wide in 42 different languages
makes the system unique. The system forms the backbone of a number of
applications developed by the action in support to EU policies
concerned with crisis management, counter-terrorism, organised crime
and media monitoring.
In 2008 the system was enhanced significantly to better deal with
ideograph based languages like Chinese and Japanese and with other
types of languages, specifically Arabic, and by extension Farsi.
Special techniques were developed and software implemented to deal with
various properties of these languages. Many more Chinese sources and
category definitions were added. Chinese and Arabic were added to the
language selection list and a complete Arabic user interface was
created, correctly handling the right to left display issues. Many
categories were enhanced with Arabic keywords. A license was obtained
for Arabic and Chinese Statistical Machine Translation software which
was integrated in the information processing chain. As a result,
English translation of the title and description of both Chinese and
Arabic articles are now available.
- MODELLING
Crisis Management: Tsunami Analysis Tool
The Tsunami Analysis Tool (TAT) is being developed at the JRC-IPSC to
assist operators in deciding if a tsunami has been generated or not, in
case of a large enough seismic event. The decision is based on the
comparison between pre-calculated scenarios and online sea level
measurements. The TAT tsunami scenario database, developed by the IPSC,
comprises 136,000 worldwide scenarios events computed every 0.5 degrees
and for magnitudes between 6.5 and 9.5, every 0.25. Once a scenario is
identified, the programme uses the calculated values to automatically
generate the alerting messages that will be sent to the relevant
authorities or for further processing.
Transport security
The project RAILPROTECT "Innovative Technologies for Safer and More
Secure Land Mass Transport Infrastructures under Terrorist Attacks"
concerns both station infrastructures and rolling stocks. Considerable
effort was dedicated in 2008 into adapting and developing the numerical
simulation techniques and applying them for the assessment of the
structural vulnerability of specific construction types encountered in
the rail transport. This work was carried out within the structural
analysis code EUROPLEXUS**. As agreed with the collaborating partners,
a station in Paris was selected for case studies and two areas of this
station and a subway coach have been successfully mapped using the 3D
laser scanning technique “JRC-RECONSTRUCTOR”. These geometric data were
further elaborated and became the required geometrical models for the
structural calculations.
**EUROPLEXUS is a general explicit computer code for the transient
dynamic analysis of fluid-structure systems. It allows to simulate
explosions, shocks, impacts etc. in complex 3D geometries, and offers
completely automatic modeling of fluid-structure interaction phenomena.
Its primary application spectrum is in safety studies of industrial
problems, in the fields of energy generation, chemical plants, marine
and offshore installations, transportation, and building vulnerability
under natural and man- made hazards, e.g. terrorist attacks, to name
just a few.
The code is mainly the fruit of more than two decades of collaboration
between the JRC and the French Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA
Saclay). A commercial version is now available through the
HYPERLINK "http://www.samcef.com/" Samtech software house .
- INTEROPERABILITY
IPSC performs interoperability tests in different areas:
Digital tachograph
As of 1 May 2006, a new control device for road vehicles, called a
digital tachograph, became mandatory on newly registered trucks. The
digital tachograph is an electronic recording device used to record and
store data on driving times, breaks and rest periods of drivers. The
security of the digital tachograph system, and the authenticity and
integrity of electronic data recorded and stored, is dependent upon a
range of technical, physical and procedural measures to resist attacks.
In this respect, IPSC is managing two major services of the Digital
Tachograph (DT): the European Root Certification Authority, which
oversees the DT cryptographic key management infrastructure, and the
Laboratory for Interoperability Certification. On the basis of a study
carried out by IPSC on the known and theoretical threats to the overall
security of the DT system, new measures aimed at detecting and
preventing abuses of the DT as well as allowing the installation of
adaptors on light vehicles were adopted by the Commission. In view of
the mandatory introduction by June 2010 of the DT in non-EU contracting
parties to the AETR (European Agreement Concerning the Work of Crews of
Vehicle Engaged in International Road Transport), the IPSC was
recognized by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe as the
AETR Authority for root certification and for interoperability
certification.
Electronic passport
Since the entry into force in June 2009 of the EU Regulation on the
electronic passports all European States being part of the Schengen
Agreement will issue electronic passports including a digital photo and
digital firgerprints.
IPSC supports the implementation of this new legislation by carrying
out tests to check that electronic passports issued by Member States
conform to European standards and thus to foster the interoperability
of electronic passports and readers within the EU.
- DATABASES
Aviation and multimodal safety data
IPSC runs "ECCAIRS", the European Centre for Collection and Assessment
of Multimodal Transport Safety Data
Accidents can occur every day, everywhere and involving anybody. What
one might not realize is that practically all accidents have been
preceded by similar, but non-fatal, incidents that followed a just
slightly different scenario. If we understand these precursors we can
make a quantum leap forward towards preventing similar accidents from
happening.
Directive 2003/42/EC on Occurrence Reporting in Civil Aviation obliges
Member States to collect and exchange the information about these
incidents since July 2005. ECCAIRS helps to cope with the
implementation of the legislation. It offers standard and flexible
accident and incident data collection, representation, exchange and
analysis tools. Following the successful example given in the aviation
domain, in the next future ECCAIRS will be applied in a similar way in
the other two public transport domains: maritime and railways
The success of ECCAIRS in the aviation sector generated interest from
two other transport domains: maritime and railways. A joint study with
the European Maritime Safety Agency in Lisbon (EMSA) resulted in a
functional prototype of a maritime version of ECCAIRS, which was
positively evaluated by a group of Member States. As a result, EMSA
decided to implement during 2009 their European Marine Casualty
Information Platform (EMCIP) on top of ECCAIRS. Following the positive
co-operation with EMSA, the European Railways Agency in Valenciennes
(ERA), considers ECCAIRS as a platform for implementing their future
European accident and incident database. A first prototype, based on
ERA’s current taxonomy, was delivered at the end of the year. The
multimodal capability of ECCAIRS is possible because of a redesign of
its IT architecture. ECCAIRS is now constructed as a transport mode
independent ‘ECCAIRS Common Framework’ on top of which specific
extensions can be deployed. This approach minimizes development time
for new extensions (even outside the transport domain if required),
guarantees a long application continuity to end-users and offers
significant savings for multimodal organisations by streamlining the IT
and support requirements
Accident Analysis and Lessons Learned
A number of obligations put on the Commission by the Seveso Directive
are being fulfilled through activities entrusted to MAHB. Such key
activities are the Major Accident Reporting System (MARS) and the
Seveso Plants Information Retrieval System (SPIRS), which are both
maintained and managed by MAHB.
MARS is the reference major accidents database worldwide. It contains
the accident reports submitted by the EU Member States in the context
of the Seveso Directive and from OECD countries according to a
voluntary scheme. In 2008, the new online system eMARS was developed
based on the longstanding experience of MAHB in accident reporting and
evaluation as well as extensive preparatory work in consultation with
Member States. In December 2008, the European Commission adopted a
decision establishing a new major accident report form for use by
national authorities, which is part of eMARS. The new system marks an
important step forward in improving the quality of accident reporting
and in facilitating the dissemination of lessons learned, in turn
helping to prevent the occurrence of similar accidents in the future.
Safety practitioners such as operators, plant designers, operators and
analysts, national authorities and the Seveso inspector community
should significantly benefit from the improved efficiency of the eMARS
system.
In parallel, the SPIRS system, presently containing data on about 8500
establishments from the EU and EEA countries, also managed successfully
by MAHB, provides the Commission and the Member States with useful
insights on the profile of industrial hazards.
- RADIO FREQUENCY IDENTIFICATION - RFID
Security of the supply chain
IPSC works on the development and validation, with respect to
interoperability, performance and conformance to standards, of
methodologies and equipment for the security of the supply chain.
IPSC develops different applications integrating intelligent seals
(based on active and passive transponder technology) and other sensors
in order to implement a fully intelligent system able to monitor and
track over the internet or GSM network the status and the position of
containers.
Poster 24 August 2009