Supporting the Additional Protocol declarations on nuclear research and technology by the JRC TIM DU platform

peer reviewedResearch subject to dual-use trade controls may play an important role in proliferation programmes because the exchanges among research entities are traditionally open and prone to be exploited by third countries’ illicit developments. For these reasons, apart from information “in the public domain” or “basic scientific research”, transfers of nuclear technology are subject to export authorisation requirements and government-to-government assurances like the export of tangible goods, as specified by the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s guidelines and national export control laws. Also the requirements of the Model Additional Protocol to the Agreement(s) between States and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of Safeguards include declarations about national research and development activities related to the nuclear fuel cycle, but do not require declarations of technology transfers to third countries. The European Commission JRC, in collaboration with Liege University, has developed the Tools for Innovation Monitoring Dual-use (TIM DU) platform that can facilitate the identification of entities publishing research with a dual-use potential in the various countries. Together with many dual-use goods and emerging technologies, TIM DU maps nuclear-fuel cycle activities’ results included in scientific abstracts, patents, and EU-funded projects, allowing analysts to gather lists of documents, geographical distributions, collaborations, and authors related to these activities. These results can help the national authorities submitting declarations to IAEA in accordance with Additional Protocol’s Article 2.a, both to identify also previously unknown national research actors and their collaboration networks, as well as to raise the awareness of national research entities about potential sensitivities with external collaborators. The IAEA could also use TIM DU to support the verification of the completeness and correctness of the declarations concerning nuclear fuel cycle research

Semantic Text Analysis tool: SeTA

An ever-growing number and length of documents, number and depth of topics covered by legislation, and ever new phrases and their slowly changing meaning, these are all contributing factors that make policy analysis more and more complex. As implication, human policy analysts and policy developers face increasing entanglement of both content and semantical levels. To overcome several of these issues, JRC has developed a central pilot tool called AI-KEAPA to support policy analysis and development in any domain. Recent developments in big data, machine learning and especially in natural language processing allow converting unfathomable complexity of many hundreds of thousands of documents into a normalised high-dimensional vector space preserving the knowledge. Unstructured text in document corpora and big data sources, until recently considered just an archive, is quickly becoming core source of analytical information using text mining methods to extract qualitative and quantitative data. Semantic analysis allows us to extract better information for policy analysis from metadata titles and abstracts than from the structured human-entered descriptions. This digital assistant allows document search and extraction over many different sources, discovery of phrase meaning, context and temporal development. It can recommend most relevant documents including their semantic and temporal interdependencies. But most importantly, it helps bursting knowledge bubbles and fast-learning new domains. This way we hope to mainstream artificial intelligence into policy support. The tool is now fit for purpose. It was thoroughly tested in real-life conditions for about two years mainly in the area of legislative impact assessments for policy formulation, and other domains such as large data infrastructure analysis, agri-environmental measures or natural disasters, some of which are detailed in this document. This approach boosts the strategic JRC focus on application of scientific analysis and development. This service adds to the JRC competence and central position in semantic reasoning for policy analysis, active information recommendation, and inferred knowledge in policy design and development.JRC.I.3-Text and Data Minin

ESARDA Bulletin n. 60

ESARDA is an association initially formed to advance and harmonize research and development for nuclear safeguards whose scope has in recent year expanded as the number and type of its working groups’ activities below indicates. Esarda is currently composed of about 30 laboratories, private and governmental institutions worldwide. Within Esarda (http://esarda.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), a number working groups have been over the years established and active namely: Techniques and Standards for Destructive Analysis, Techniques and Standards for Non-Destructive Analysis, Containment and Surveillance, Novel Approaches / Novel Technologies, Implementation of Safeguards, Verification Technologies and Methodologies, Training and Knowledge Management, Editorial Committee. ESARDA publishes a Bulletin containing peer reviewed scientific related to nuclear Safeguards, verification and non-proliferation. This publication appears generally twice a year. In addition, thematic special issues are published as proposed by the ESARDA community. The Bulletin Editorial Board is composed of about 10 experts in the various technical and scientific fields related to safeguards. They are all actively engaged in safeguards R&D or in safeguards implementation and other fields. The Editorial Board decides the contents of the Bulletin, selects the papers to be published and reviews them before publication. All ESARDA editorial activities are carried out at JRC in Ispra. Scientific papers submitted for publication are reviewed by independent authors and by members of the Editorial Committee. The Bulletin is currently submitted to Scopus for evaluation in view of citation. ESARDA Bulletin is published jointly by ESARDA and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and distributed free of charge to over 1000 registered members, libraries and institutions worldwide.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit