Mentura to Participate in Project Alpha - Focussing on Hybrid Threats and Situational Awareness

Research and new competences in situational awareness of hybrid operations

In the last year with the tense international situation, hybrid threats have become one of the most urgent discussion topics. At the same time, improving the efficiency of public safety authorities is an important development target. The aim of the Project Alpha, which is of national and international significance, is to create new knowledge, expertise and new shared innovations for identifying hybrid threats as well as for forming situational awareness to guarantee the safety of citizens and authorities.

Responding to hybrid threats requires broader than before situational awareness based on field data and diverse data sources. The Project Alpha research, which is part of the Business Finland Digital Trust programme, develops data models that can be used to integrate data from different systems and data sources. The data models enable the presentation of user-specific situational awareness in networked and allied inter-agency activities. Security authorities should be able to better utilise the data collected for the situational awareness in order to react to changes more quickly and to identify hybrid threats.

Experimenting in test environments supports and verifies the research of situational awareness solutions, the integration of solutions from different organisations and public field experiments. Workshops and field trials also play an important role in the achievement of the Project Alpha’s co-operation and objectives.

Mentura announced that the company pleased to be part of such important project aiming to improve identification of hybrid threats and forming situational awareness to guarantee the safety of citizens and authorities. 

"We believe that projects like Alpha project, bringing together the public sector, higher education institutions and expert companies are highly important for combatting complex hybrid threats and to build a safer society."
 

The Project Alpha gives authorities a better understanding of situational awareness and improves decision-making capabilities in the authorities’ field operations, control centres, and regional and national organisations. Different authorities also have a better ability to coordinate their actions, which improves public safety. The project’s business partners strive to accelerate their growth by renewing their product portfolios and aiming for new market segments, which will be reflected in the long-term growth of business, exports and employment opportunities.

The multidisciplinary approach brings together companies, higher education institutions and the public sector to develop sustainable integrated situational awareness to support inter-agency decision-making. The Project Alpha consortium comprises two research partners as well as 12 companies and authorities. Centria University of Applied Sciences co-ordinating the project and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland participate in the research. The project partners include Airbus, Anarky Labs, Bittium, EXFO, Erillisverkot, Fairspectrum, Goodmill Systems, Insta, Mentura, Nokia, the Finnish Defence Research Agency (FDRA) and the Finnish Ministry of the Interior.