We were very pleased to hold our Stakeholder and Public Workshop this week ahead of the WCO Technology Conference in Maastricht. A hybrid meeting, it was attended both by partners from the project and external customs authorities that brought additional operational experience to the discussions.
First up, the partners presented details of where we currently are in the development of the technical solutions, as well as outlining the plans for the field tests in Spring 2023. These tests will put the technologies through their paces in real life scenarios and will be assessed by the customs authorities in the project to see whether they can add real value to their work on a day to day basis.
Next we heard about the interesting potential solution of using federated learning as a way of helping customs authorities manage the sometimes challenging question of sharing data across borders. Much of this data is of course confidential, so it can be a challenge to apply it in research projects such as ours. Wil van Heeswijk then shared the European Commission viewpoint on data sharing across borders, before we had a very interesting and productive round table discussion and audience Q&A on the subject.
We were delighted to welcome senior representatives from Dutch and Swiss Customs to the Workshop, who engaged very positively in the subsequent debate, offering further insight from an operational perspective. Our thanks from the @ENTRANCE project to everyone involved.
Please click on the link to see the full agenda.
The technical team is now developing the technologies ahead of the field tests in Spring of 2023, which will be held in Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Belgium. Practitioners will assess the potential impact of the solutions to identify and alert customs authorities across Europe of illegal contraband and other threats including weapons, drugs, radioactive and nuclear materials in a series of challenging real-life scenarios at road, rail and sea border crossing points.
