Since the institute was founded, Santa Anna has hosted the Swedish national initiative for Digital Forensics, the network ‘Digital Forensics Sweden’. The network was established in 2018 at the initiative of the National Forensic Center (NFC, now part of the Swedish Police Authority), and has been active since then. When the Santa Anna IT Research Institute later was formed, there was a need to create an independent actor in close cooperation with mainly the Swedish Police Authority and the Swedish National Forensic Centre, but also other organizations with similar needs (such as the Tax Agency, the Customs Agency, the Swedish Coast Guard, PRV, the Ecocrime Authority, the Forensic Medicine Agency, the Swedish Banking Association, Region Östergötland, AI Sweden, etc).
Within the partner network of Digital Forensics Sweden, a number of projects are run with the aim of connecting the needs owners’ challenges in digital forensics to research and companies with the knowledge and opportunity to develop and commercialize new forensic tools, and work to detect, investigate, prevent cyber crime or develop and use digital methods in traditional criminal cases, ultimately with the goal of creating more efficient criminal investigations and increased legal certainty. For example, these can be tools for digitally visualizing crime scenes, collecting digital evidence with drones carrying customized sensors, securing evidence in camera footage from surveillance cameras, identifying deep fakes with multimodal AI methods, using generative AI and large language models to reduce large amounts of data, securing digital evidence for war crimes from satellite images or using edge AI and so-called federated learning to be able to apply AI to sensitive data. The companies participating in the projects are at the forefront of using deeptech for both civil and military purposes.