The NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) recently organized a multi-national workshop on “Big Data Challenges – Situation Awareness and Decision Support”. The aims of the workshop were to raise awareness of: common and different problems; available and foreseen technologies; capabilities and efforts; and also, to support the development of research collaborations.
The field of broadly defined energetic materials has been of increasing basic and applied importance, and become increasingly interdisciplinary in the last decades. The issue on “Energetic Materials in Defence”, aims to establish a timely forum for the discussion of cutting-edge research on (a) transformative concepts on development and application of energetic materials, and (b) multidisciplinary R&D on energetic materials, with emphasis on emergent areas. This issue is calling for both original research papers and topic reviews.
The European Defence Agency Project Strategy-Oriented Analysis of the Market Forces in EU defence (SOLOMON) intends to merge the two complementary visions of grand strategy (as it emerges from EU geo/political/economic postures) and business strategy (as it emerges from the Michael Porter’s value chain theory) to outline the possible roadmaps for tackling the supply risk of the EU defence systems in a world of changing strategies, emerging technologies and mutating government restrictions.
In the last years irregular migration has decreased in Europe. In FRONTEX’s annual risk analysis 2020 risk it is shown that the number of detected illegal border crossings at Europe’s land borders – the area between border control points - is increasing. An essential task for border guards is to detect irregular border crossings by illegal migrants using vehicles; such migrants seek to cross borders in small groups in difficult vegetation such as forests, where the traffickers cannot be detected by current technologies.
