Zanasi & Partners joins ECSO

Press release

Zanasi & Partners joins ECSO

Modena (MO), Italy, 4 November 2016 – Zanasi & Partners is proud to announce that, as of today, it has become a full member of the European Cyber Security Organisation (ECSO).

Founded in 2016, ECSO brings together the key stakeholders from the European cyber security sector. The main objective of ECSO is to support all types of initiatives or projects that aim to develop, promote, encourage European cybersecurity, with particular emphasis on:

• Foster and protect from cyber threats the growth of the European Digital Single Market;
• Develop the cybersecurity market in Europe and the growth of a competitive cybersecurity and ICT industry, with an increased market position;
• Develop and implement cybersecurity solutions for the critical steps of trusted supply chains, in sectoral applications where Europe is a leader.

‘Cyber threats constitute one of the most serious issues Europe is facing today’ – said Alessandro ZANASI, President of Zanasi & Partners, who also reminded – ‘our economy is heavily dependent on interconnected computer networks: communications, financial transactions, monitoring and management of critical infrastructure… everything depends on the correct functioning of those networks’.

‘Cyber espionage, as demonstrated by the discovery of the ECHELON system earlier and by Snowden’s revelations later, is common practice which costs targeted companies billions of dollars. Worldwide, according to a recent study by Forbes, the costs due to cybercrime activities are expected to reach $2 trillion by 2019’ Zanasi claimed.

 ‘Joining ECSO represents a great opportunity for us’ – concluded Zanasi – ‘as it will give a further boost to our already active involvement in the European cybersecurity scene. It will allow us to create new synergies with the leading cyber security European organisations and this, in turn, will translate into new opportunities for jointly undertaking research activities and developing state-of-the-art services that we will be able to provide to our clients’.

More information on ECSO are available at: http://www.ecs-org.eu

Zanasi & Partners participated to BODEGA field studies at Rome Fiumicino airport

On the 21st and 22nd of June 2016, Zanasi & Partners took part in a field study carried out at Rome Fiumicino airport within the context of the BODEGA project.

BODEGA (Proactive Enhancement of Human Performance in Border Control) is a three-year research effort funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme. Its aim is to investigate the psychological factors affecting human behaviour of both travellers and border control operators during control operations at the frontiers.

The two-day event at Fiumicino airport was organised by Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli and saw Z&P working together with researchers from Thales (France) and the University of Namur (Belgium) as well as with representatives of Polizia di Frontiera.

The research team visited the airport’s customs and border control area and conducted several interviews with custom officers and border control personnel. Special attention was devoted by the researchers to the functioning of the Automated Border Control and video-surveillance systems in place at the airport.

The field study represented a valuable opportunity for the BODEGA consortium to gather first-hand information about the customs and border control activities carried out at one of the largest airports in Europe. Furthermore, it allowed the research team to gain a better understanding of the role played by two key stakeholders in the European border management process: Agenzia delle Dogane e dei Monopoli and Polizia di Frontiera.

Download the press release here.

SOTERIA campaign of experimentation in Kuopio, Finland

On the last 15th and 16th February, the European consortium running the SOTERIA project has organised in Kuopio, Finland, a two-day event part of the SOTERIA campaign of experimentation (COE).

Zanasi & Partners, who participated to the event with Fabio RUINI and Simone BUSOLI, successfully tested its MS2A (Multilingual Social Stream Analysis) application in different simulated disaster scenarios.

The Multilingual Social Stream Analysis, developed by Z&P, is used for the automated analysis of textual multilingual social media messages for disaster response purposes. MS2A, by relying on natural language processing and text mining techniques, can perform two different operations, sentiment analysis and clustering:

• sentiment analysis is the computational study of people’s opinion, appraisals, attitudes, and emotions towards entities, individuals, issues, events, topics, and their attributes. Within the context of MS2A, the assumption is that the more negative the sentiment associated with a social media post is, the higher the chances that who has written it needs help. Sentiment analysis can therefore be used for prioritising messages gathered from social media;
• clustering, which in the literature is defined as the problem of finding groups of similar objects in the data, applied to the text domain refers to grouping a set of texts in such a way that texts in the same cluster are more similar to each other than to those in other clusters. During an emergency situation, automatically clustering tweets will allow to correctly classify the information available based on the issues it refers to, as well as to possibly discover new emerging issues.

The experiments carried out in Kuopio have confirmed the validity and the robustness of the solution developed by Z&P, which has been confirmed by the feedback given by the public safety organisations’ personnel who took part to the exercise.

The Finnish national tv channel Yle has published on its website an interesting report on the event, featuring Zanasi & Partners’ Fabio RUINI.