On 23 and 24 May 2024, the UIC Security Division, represented by Marie-Hélène Bonneau, Head of the UIC Security Division, and Kacper Kubrak, Senior Advisor, attended the 4th Plenary Meeting of the EU-funded ODYSSEUS project (Unobtrusive Technologies for Secure and Seamless Border Crossing for Travel Facilitation). The meeting took place in Athens, Greece.
ODYSSEUS aims to enhance the experience of border crossing for travellers and border authorities’ staff, while maintaining security and tracking movements across the external water and land borders of the European Union. It will offer a comprehensive framework for improving border checks by the authorities, while enhancing the travel experience for EU and non-EU citizens.
The meeting brought together all partners from the project’s consortium. On the first day of the meeting, consortium partners provided individual updates on the work carried out and future plans within their scope of the project. In the afternoon, a comprehensive update of the EU AI Act was presented, with the aim of emphasising the significance of this act for the project’s future endeavours.
The second day consisted of an in-depth session on the practical application of ODYSSEUS pilot test technologies. During this discussion, the UIC Security Division discussed the organisation of the train pilot, which will be conducted in a real-life scenario on the train border between Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The pilot will demonstrate the project’s technologies for seamless identity verification in a real EU train border setting. This will be one of the four pilot tests planned by the project to be performed next year.
The UIC Security Division contributes to the project as a rail end-user representative, and has already helped to gather rail end-users’ needs and requirements in order to define the project’s use cases for railway borders.
The ODYSSEUS project has received funding from European Union’s Horizon Europe Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101073910.
You can follow ODYSSEUS on Twitter/X (@odysseus_heu), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/odysseusproject-heu/), and via the project website: https://odysseusproject.eu/.
