The AMiCA ("Automatic Monitoring for Cyberspace Applications") project aims to mine relevant website resources (blogs, chat rooms and social networks), and collect, analyse, and integrate large amounts of subjective information using text and image analysis with the ultimate goal of tracing harmful content in an automatic way.
Given the increasing impact of video and image in live streaming applications, there is also an urgent need for a multimedia approach, which aims at the reliable detection of potentially harmful images (e.g., porn, automutilation). Classifiers will be built that are able to spot harmful content “on-the-fly”. If critical situations are detected (e.g. a very violent communication), alerts can be issued, sent to the relevant users and visualized in an intelligent manner, depending on the user they are addressed to (customized to the user profile). This real time search is indispensable in life and privacy threatening situations we aim to monitor. The alerts are needed at different levels: by the policy makers and law enforcement to adopt informed decisions and re-direct (possible) victims to the online restorative and assistance services, by moderators of social network sites to ban unwanted content, by parents to be integrated in parental control software, and –most importantly- by the young users themselves.