Law enforcement practitioners, social scientists and data analytics experts from the EU, including Vicomtech, work together in FALCON project, aimed at understanding and fighting fraudulent actions.

There is no doubt that corruption consists of one of the most difficult social and political phenomena to identify, understand and eradicate. The lack of technological tools for this purpose is a reality that institutions and organisations are constantly facing.

It is in this context that FALCON was born, a project financed by the Horizon Europe programme, which, over a course of three years and with the participation of 25 organisations from 15 countries, aims to address this challenge of the fight against corruption.

Coordinated by the Greek Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS), the FALCON project consortium brings together experts in all areas, ranging from technology institutions and companies, to organizations specialized in the field of social sciences, and law enforcement agencies from six EU states.

A key concept of FALCON is the Corruption Intelligence Picture (CIP), which provides a holistic view of specific areas of corruption.

In order to establish these CIPs and gradually refine them, the aim is, on the one hand, to develop new indicators for policy decisions; and on the other hand, by following a data-driven approach and building on existing assets, to integrate powerful analytical tools and data pipelines and applications.

Development of IT tools for risk assessment, research and decision support.

These IT tools thus enable comprehensive corruption risk assessment and informed decision making, as well as supporting law enforcement and assisting in the investigation of individual cases.

FALCON creates a "common representational model", a kind of knowledge graph that allows incorporation of heterogeneous data from a wide range of sources.

Given that Artificial Intelligence methods play a key role in this analysis, ethical requirements will be addressed in a specific work package, in order to guarantee privacy and data protection and to ensure the security and reliability of AI models.

Vicomtech, in charge of Trustworthy AI, Security, privacy and ethics by design

In FALCON, Vicomtech plays a dual role. Firstly, it is in charge of trusted, secure, private and ethical AI by design. It analyses ways to ensure the functionality of AI components under various types of common security threats based on ENISA (European Cybersecurity Agency) guidelines. This analysis will enable the design of AI tools that are robust and resilient to adversarial attacks.

Secondly, Vicomtech will work on researching and developing a tool capable of analysing crypto transactions and extracting behaviors and features that might be used as corruption indicators. As a result, the newly identified indicators will serve as input to a corruption detection support module, which will exploit deep learning approaches to detect early warnings of corruption.

It is a reality that the eradication of these behaviours and criminal networks is of significant urgency. Projects such as FALCON have shown that, in recent years, the fields in which Vicomtech works, such as Artificial Intelligence and the development of predictive models, have become one of the main allies in the fight against these phenomena that cause so much harm to our political, economic, and social system.

Consortium members: Institute of Communication and Computer Systems ICCS - NTUA (as coordinator) | Fraunhofer IOSB | Baltic Institute of Advanced Technology BPTI | Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) | Engineering Ingegneria Informatica Spa | SPACE HELLAS S.A. | Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) | Vicomtech | ABI Lab | University of Strasbourg (BETA lab) | Government Transparency Institute | Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Transcrime | Crime&tech srl | University of Gothenburg | Akademia Antykorupcyjna | Bulgarian Defence Institute | General Police Inspectorate - Ministry of Internal Affairs, Moldova | Ministère de l'Intérieur et des Outre-mer with Centre de Recherche ENSP / Research Center ENSP | Ministry of Interior of the Republic of Serbia | Chief Directorate Border Police, Bulgaria | RadExpert consulting & management SRL, Romania | Iasi Territorial Inspectorate of Romanian Border Police | State Border Guard Service (VSAT), Lithuania | CENTIC at Sheffield Hallam University | Basel Institute on Governance | University of Basel

DISCLAIMER: Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.