This project responds to the need for the rapid and effective management of scenarios immediately following a terrorist attack with chemical and biological (CB) agents, and to control the diffusion of contamination in the short to long-term. The project’s overall strategic objective is to multi-sourced, real-time platform. REACT contributes to NATO’s commitment to “further develop NATO’s capacity to defend against the threat of chemical, biological and radiological nuclear weapons” as laid out in the Strategic Concept (2010). This project will also contribute to NATO’s objective of projecting stability in the South Caucasus region through partnership and cooperation.

REACT aims to develop ad innovative platform for the rapid and effective management of scenarios immediately following a terrorist attack with chemical and biological agents. The platform will be built on two main analysis system, to monitor and interact with CBRN context information.
The first is an environmental physico-chemical sensing network. It will be developed as a flexible, hierarchical network of multi-sensor stations to be easily applied and adapted at limited installation and operational costs, and will permanently monitor wide areas. The second is a social sensing machine-learning-based approach. REACT will build on the Social Media Analytics and Reporting Tool (SMART), and integrate social network data and environmental parameters on CB attacks to increase first responders’ situational awareness.

REACT will be designed as a permanent alarm system and platform, which will apply threshold criteria to both outputs of the integrated data and their uncertainties. The immediate detection of anomalies, and the visualization of their location through intelligent mapping will provide instantly usable references for immediate response to protect populations and environments. The platform’s architecture will generate and allow the visualization of real-time data. which can be used to track and interpret the evolution of a CB attack, and to evaluate the effectiveness of first-response interventions.