Babak Akhgar

Babak Akhgar is Professor of Informatics and Director of CENTRIC (Center of excellence in terrorism, resilience, intelligence and organized crime research) at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Akhgar graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in Software Engineering. He gained considerable commercial experience as a Strategy Analyst and Methodology Director for several international companies. Prof. Babak Akhgar obtained a Master degree (with distinction) in Information Systems in Management and a PhD in Information Systems. He has more than 100 referred publications in international journals and conferences on information systems with specific focus on knowledge management (KM). He is member of editorial boards of a number of international Journals, Chair and programme committee member of several international conferences. Akhgar has extensive and hands on experience in development, management and execution of KM projects and large international security initiatives (e.g., Application of social media in crisis management, intelligence-based combating of terrorism and organised crime, Gun crime, cyber security, Public Order and cross cultural ideology polarization) with multimillion Euros budgets.

In addition to this he is the technical lead of two EU Security projects; “Courage” which focuses on Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism and “Athena project” which focuses on the application of social media and mobile devices in crisis management. He has co-edited a book on Intelligence management (Knowledge Driven frameworks for combating Terrorism and Organised crime). His recent books are titled Strategic Intelligence Management (National Security Imperatives and Information and Communications Technologies) 2013 and Emerging Trends in ICT Security 2014. Prof. Akhgar is also a member of academic advisory board of SAS UK.

Andrew Staniforth

Detective Inspector Andrew Staniforth has extensive operational counter-terrorism experience in the UK. As a qualified teacher he has designed national counter-terrorism exercise programmes and delivers training to police commanders from across the world at the UK College of Policing. He is the author of the Blackstone’s Counter-Terrorism Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2013), the Blackstone’s Handbook of Ports and Borders Security (Oxford University Press, 2013), the Routledge Companion to UK Counter-Terrorism (Routledge, 2012) and Preventing Terrorism and Violent Extremism (Oxford University Press, 2014). Andrew is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Excellence for Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research (CENTRIC), and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Law, University of Leeds. He currently leads a research team at West Yorkshire Police progressing multi-disciplinary international security projects.

Francesca Bosco

Francesca Bosco earned a degree in International Law and joined UNICRI in 2006 as a member of the Emerging Crimes Unit. In her role in this organization, Bosco is responsible for cybercrime prevention projects, and in conjunction with key strategic partners, has developed new methodologies and strategies for researching and countering computer-related crimes.

She has collaborated on different cybercrime-related projects such as the Hackers Profiling Project (HPP), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) Security, a multi-level training program for ICT and security professionals, lawyers, and law enforcement agencies. Bosco has also participated as a speaker in various conferences and training seminars on the topic of child online pornography and has contributed to the development ITU Child Online Protection (COP) guidelines.

More recently, Bosco has been researching and developing technical assistance and capacity building programs to counter the involvement of organized crime in cybercrime, as well as on the legal implications and future scenarios of cyber terrorism and cyber war. She is also researching and managing projects on hate speech online and on data protection issues related to automated profiling. Bosco is one of the founders of the Tech and Law Center and she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Milan.