Technology Development for Security Practitioners

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics, co-founder and Director of CENTRIC (Centre of excellence in terrorism, resilience, intelligence and organized crime research) at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Prof Akhgar graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in Software Engineering. Afterwards he gained considerable commercial experience as a Strategy Analyst and Methodology Director for several companies. He consolidated this experience by obtaining a Masters degree (with distinction) in Information Systems in Management and a PhD in Strategic Information Systems from Sheffield Hallam University. He has more than 140 publications in international journals and conferences on SIS with specific focus on knowledge management (KM) within security domain. He has successfully supervised 12 PhD students. He is member of editorial boards of a number of international Journals, Chair and programme committee member of several international conferences. He has extensive and hands on experience in development, management and execution of Intelligence Management projects in large international security initiatives (e.g. Application of social media in crisis management , intelligence based combating of terrorism and organised crime, Gun crime, cyber security, Big Data and cross cultural ideology polarisation) with multi-million Euros budgets. In addition to this he is currently the technical lead of 3 EU Security projects; "Courage" on Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism and "Athena project" on Application of social media and mobile devices in crisis management and "Tensor" on identification of terrorist generated content. Prof Akhgar is founder of CENTRIC OSINT Hub, which provides law enforcement agencies with state of art capabilities to conduct wide range of open source based investigation from Organised Crime network to Counter Terrorism. CENTRIC OSINT HUB is used by wide range of LEAs in UK. He has co-editeda book on Intelligence management (Knowledge Driven frameworks for combating Terrorism and Organised crime). His recent books are titled Strategic Intelligence Management (National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies) Emerging Trends in ICT Security, Application of Big Data for National Security and Application of OSINT for investigation. Prof Akhgar was Trustee of Police National Legal Database (PNLD) for 2 years. In 2016 Prof Akhgar was chairman of Police Strategy forum. Prof Akhgar is member of academic advisory board of SAS UK, member of UN Safer cities technology task force, Board member of European Organisation for Security (EOS) and member of Europol external advisory board on data protection.

Dimitrios Kavallieros is a researcher - project manager at the Center for Security Studies - KEMEA of the Hellenic Ministry of Citizen Protection. He holds an MSc in Ethical Hacking and Computer Security from the University of Abertay. He is currently PhD candidate at University of Peloponnese. He has also published more than 15 articles in conference proceedings, journals and book chapters with specific focus in cybersecurity, cyberterrorism and digital forensics. He has participated in several European and National funded research projects, mainly focused on Cybersecurity, Cybercrime and Cyberterrorism, IoT & Cloud Security/Forensics, Digital Forensics and Blockchain technology. Currently he is the coordinator of the EU H2020-project Cyber-Trust on IoT cybersecurity and of the EU H2020-project FORESIGHT on cybersecurity preparedness, cyber range and simulation and the innovation manager of the EU H2020-project PROPHETS on human factors and new methods to prevent, investigate and mitigate cybercriminal behaviours. In addition, he acts as the project manager of several H2020 projects in KEMEA, including but not limited to AIDA, LOCARD and SPARTA. Most recently he co-authored the chapter books paper Privacy Issues in Voice Assistant Ecosystems, Blockchain Solutions for Forensic Evidence Preservation in IoT Environments (IEEE) and A Review of Cyber-Ranges and Test-Beds: Current and Future Trends ( Sensors)

Mr. Evangelos Sdongos is a Researcher and Scientific Project Manager at the I-SENSE Group of Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS). He holds a MEng. in Telecommunications and Information Technology from the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department of Patras University and a MBA from Hellenic Open University. He is currently PhD candidate at National Technical University of Athens. He has also published several articles in book chapters, journals and conference proceedings. Evangelos has extensive experience in the Telecommunications domain, with regards to design, planning, implementation and integration phases of Mobile/Wireless Communication Networks (Radio Access, Transport and Core tiers for 3G/4G/5G) for either Mission Critical or Public Communications and related services. Moreover, he has significant knowledge of embedded systems and sensors in particular within the Security field. He has worked in several industrial projects involving national wide roll-out of telecommunication infrastructure (RAN and IP-Core) by major operators and vendors in Europe and Middle East as well as in research projects funded under the 7th FP. Since September 2013, he is working in ICCS as Project and Technical Manager at a wide range of EU funded (FP7 and H2020) projects including but not limited to PPDR-TC, eVACUATE, INTE-TRANSIT, PASSME, NEXES and RECONASS. Since September 2017 he is leading the Crisis Management & Security Unit under the Smart Integrated Systems Team of the I-SENSE Group. His research interests include mobile/wireless telecommunication technologies, sensors and sensor networks, IoT and M2M, embedded systems and unmanned platforms (UxVs) with emphasis to security and crisis management applications such as next generation emergency services, disaster risk reduction, critical communications, border surveillance, asset-resources-infrastructure monitoring and situational awareness in crisis environments. He is mostly active in the field of Security under several domains (Civil Protection, Crisis management, Transport, Smart Cities, Critical Infrastructure, ICT) focusing on uptake of novel technologies for improving operational procedures and decision making.