Getting ready for the final step
Partners of the PROTON Consortium have gathered in Milan (Italy) on the 15th and 16th of October 2018. The goal was to discuss the progress made during the first half of the project and organise the work to be done in the next months. The meeting was hosted by Transcrime, the Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, coordinator of PROTON. The first day was mainly devoted to discussing with the policymaker partners the outputs of the three meetings with policymakers and experts organised by PROTON in September. The first meeting focused on Terrorism and took place in Amsterdam (the Netherlands) on the 5th of September 2018; the second one was organised in Milan on the 20th of September 2018 and was dedicated to the Italian organised crime; the third meeting focused on the Dutch organised crime and was held in Amsterdam on the 21st of September 2018. During the three September meetings, PROTON representatives presented the project’s methodology and objectives to raise awareness of PROTON among potential future end users. The meetings were also a fruitful occasion to collect valuable inputs and suggestions for the development of PROTON’s main final outputs: PROTON-S and PROTON Wizard. The former is an Agent-Based Simulation procedure creating virtual societies to help politicians assess the impact of crime- and terrorism-prevention policies; the latter is a user-friendly interface embedding PROTON-S and enabling quick access to the simulation results, hence facilitating the testing and comparison of different initiatives in the realm of security. The development of PROTON-S and PROTON Wizard will be the main target of the Consortium until the end of the project, and it will be based on the indications collected through the detailed literature review performed over the first half of PROTON. The second day of the meeting hosted a fruitful discussion on the multiple technical aspects to be considered for the development of PROTON-S and PROTON Wizard. In particular, the ideas exchange focused on how to deliver simulations that are as representative as possible of real societies and can therefore provide reliable results. The discussion was supported by the Ethical and Legal Advisory Group, which consists of key independent experts helping PROTON deliver outputs compliant with ethical and societal requirements. The meeting turned out to be very useful in providing a solid basis for the activities to be completed in the next months and to collect all elements needed for making the final steps.
Keywords
psychology, terrorism, crime
Countries
Netherlands