Projects to Policy Seminar: security research projects feed into policy making

The annual Projects to Policy Seminar (PPS) took place on 10 and 11 June in Brussels to gather all the newly begun research projects in the area of civil security for society. This year was a particularly busy edition with over 160 participants drawn from almost 40 new projects, representatives from 6 Directorate Generals, 4 EU agencies and the European Research Executive Agency (REA). The PPS is co-organised by DG HOME's unit for Innovation and Strategic Autonomy and REA's Secure Society unit.

Many of the new projects focus on crucial technologies needed to keep Europe's citizens safe in the coming years, such as automated customs checks, cross-country information sharing in large-scale disaster situations, state of the art forensics or the protection of critical infrastructure such as telecommunications - all of them vitally important components of Europe's strategic autonomy. The objective of the event was, as ever, to make sure projects get to update policy makers on the direction technology is taking in the future, and policy makers give an insight to researchers into what they are working on.

Participants met in breakout sessions where they explored topics like end-user involvement in consortia, the use of and access to data, and the dissemination and exploitation of research results. Most of all, however, this year's PPS was again a great opportunity to network and for researchers to realise that they are working as part of a security community, where research results from one project can feed into another and where neither policy nor research can operate in isolation.

Over and above that, the seminar again included presentations on communication, dissemination and uptake of outcomes, to help projects get prepared to deal with media attention, and to get the most out of their hard work after the end of the project. This is particularly important to make sure European research outcomes do not end up sitting on a shelf, but instead help to keep people in Europe safe, uphold European values and promote European technological leadership and competitiveness.