Maritime knowledge discovery and anomaly detection : workshop proceedings : Ispra, 5-6 July 2016

Thousands of vessels cross EU waters and hundreds enter into EU ports every day, generating an overwhelming amount of tracking data and reports that make it possible to disguise illegal operations. Detecting steadily changing deceptive behaviours at sea is becoming like trying to find a needle in a haystack and calls for advanced automatic and adaptive tools to discover useful information from the data. Data mining, information fusion and visual analytics are becoming central to the discovery of knowledge from the increasingly available information on vessels and their movements (e.g. Automatic Identification System - AIS, Long Range Identification and Tracking - LRIT, radar tracks, Earth Observation) at global scale. This enables the automatic detection of structured anomalies, the prediction of vessel routes up to a few days in advance, the behavioural characterisation of vessels, the understanding and mapping of activities at sea and the analysis of their trends over time. Such knowledge provides a new set of possibilities for improving Maritime Situational Awareness and safety of navigation, understanding what is happening and might be happening at sea. This event brought together technology and research providers (academia, industry) and users (operational authorities) in the field of Maritime Knowledge Discovery to identify current capability gaps and highlight the most promising research strands. Authorities set the scene either through presentations (Section I), speeches and live demos introducing the current operational capabilities. This was followed up by industry (Section II), showing the latest state-of-the-art on big data services in the maritime domain. Finally, academia and research centres introduced the latest research efforts and methods to improve knowledge discovery in the maritime domain (Section III). A final round-table discussion helped collecting suggestions from authorities and industry to highlight the most promising and relevant areas of research and identified, together with research providers, possible solutions. This is summarized in the Conclusions and Remarks Section.