The THESEUS Project (THESEUS- “Connect the Disconnections – from Disparate Data to Insightful Analysis”, 10/2019 – 09/2021) is here!
We live in a world where the fast-paced technological advancements of the last decades have generated instruments and technologies that radically changed patterns of consumption of information in all aspects of the social life. In the past, organizations could employ statistical models of analysis to explore datasets manually, but the volume and variety of data have outstripped the capacity of manual analysis.
The emergence of big data analytics enables organizations to structure, process and analyze the rapidly growing volume and diversity of information as an integrated part of their decision-support system (diagnosis, process-tracing, forecasting). It does however require complex workloads that push the boundaries and threaten to turn into irrelevance a number of professional categories of great importance for the sustainable development of society. Therefore, new skills and competences have to be acquired so as to ensure:
- A conceptual understanding of the analytical process – types of data and techniques required to express and analyze different aspects of the social system, understanding the methodologies that govern recent innovations so as to cater towards the needs of the stakeholders involved, the applicability and use of innovative instruments and technologies in the professional activity;
- Minimum IT skills to carry out specific tasks.
THESEUS aims to enhance human capital and knowledge base by tackling directly skills and competences required and providing an understanding of the processes guiding big data analytics, without the technical details of a technologically focused course.
The courses avoid an algorithm-centered approach. They focus on how, in these professional categories, options are understood and choices and tradeoffs are designed. Thus, they enhance, through learning by doing techniques, key-competences and skills required in
- collecting,
- understanding
- correlating and
- processing big data
helping them streamline problem-solving processes in a data-driven ecosystem.
Our project addresses two professional categories:
- Governance and social scientists;
- National security practitioners, whose complementary work is of paramount importance in insuring the sustainable development of democracy.
THESEUS involves 4 partners from 3 different Member states: ANIMV (Romania), NTNU (Norway), SNSPA (Romania), University of Malta (Malta) and comes as a natural continuation of the partners’ efforts to date.
MVNIA has conducted several projects with the purpose of incorporating technology in the training process of future security and intelligence practitioners. Within the START project, practitioners were trained to understand and use the Endeca platform (platform to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured limited amounts of information). The INTELLISEC project developed several virtual scenarios, allowing students to experiment, in a hands-on learning environment, situations that simulate real-life experiences and interpret the data collected using innovative analytical tools. Furthermore, MVNIA is now coordinating a nationally-funded project within which dedicated infrastructure for research and innovation will be developed. The laboratories will be equipped with software that allows big data analysis and visualization.
University of Malta – Department of Information Policy and Governance (UoM-DIPG) coordinates the Lex Converge research consortium. It is a wide consortium aiming at developing inter-disciplinary work on legal aspects of emerging technologies. The Lex Converge consortium, implemented, among the most recent projects, EVIDENCE – European Informatics Data Exchange Framework for Courts and Evidence, SMART – Scalable Measures for Automated Recognition Technologies, RESPECT – Rules, Expectations & Security through Privacy-Enhanced Convenient Technologies, MAPPING – Managing Alternatives for Privacy, Property and Internet Governance and CONSENT – Consumer sentiment regarding privacy on user generated content (UGC) services in the digital economy. This project also comes as a natural continuation of the projects developed by UoM-DIPG until now, as it applies already developed knowledge to the new challenge to privacy, which is the automatic processing of large volumes of data.
The Norwegian Technical University (NTU) – Department of Information Security and Communication Technology has a wide expertise in big data analysis, social network analysis, machine learning, and malware detection. In addition to the ESSENTIAL project, the head of the Department prof. Katherine Franke has been involved in a number of applied research projects such as “Ars Forensica”, “Dark Web”, and “Forensic Methodology”. She is the author of numerous peer-reviewed research articles and books on the topics mentioned above. The project comes as a relevant continuation of the work carried out in the Department and will act as a platform of dissemination for the knowledge that the Department possesses.
The National University of Political Studies and Public Administration- Center for Civic Participation and Democracy (SNSPA-CCPD) has implemented a number of projects dedicated to the analysis of patterns of communication by the Russian Federation. This project builds on the previous ones by improving the data analysis skills of communication researchers and by offering them access to new tools to carry out their work.
Finally, THESEUS is part of “Education, Scholarships, Apprenticeships and Youth Entrepreneurship Programme” in Romania, funded by the EEA Grants – Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 under the Agreement number: 18-COP-0017