Big Data Analytics for Computational Maritime Situational Awareness

Collaborators: Maritime security researchers at the CMRE Sponsors: NATO ACT

Computational Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) supports the maritime industry, governments, and international organizations with machine learning and data mining techniques for analyzing vessel traffic data available through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). A critical challenge of scaling computational MSA to large data sets is integrating the core learning algorithms with big data concepts and techniques. My colleagues and I at the CMRE are addressing this challenge: we are developing prototypes of big data analytics plaftforms that support maritime vessel traffic characterization, anomaly detection, processing pipelines for summary statistics, and visualization dashboards at scale. In 2020, this work and its extensions were recognized with the NATO Science and Technology Organization Excellence Award, the highest scientific achievent award given by the scientific arm of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.