Research Presentations

CRISIS: Integrating AIS and Ocean Data Streams Using Semantic Web Standards for Event Detection

Information deluge is still an issue in the maritime environment, creating situations where data are sometimes underutilized or in more extreme cases, not utilized, in the decision-making process. In part, this is due to the high volume of incoming data that are available to the operational community. However, better exploitation of these data streams can be accomplished through techniques that focus on the semantics of the incoming stream, to discover information-based alerts that generate knowledge that is only obtainable when considering the totality of the streams. In this paper, we present an agile data architecture for real-time data representation, integration, and querying situations over heterogeneous data streams using Semantic Web Technologies, with the goal of improved knowledge interoperability. We apply the framework to the maritime ship traffic domain to discover real-time traffic alerts by querying and reasoning across multiple streams.

Challenges in Vessel Behavior and Anomaly Detection: From Classical Machine Learning to Deep Learning

The global expansion of maritime activities and the development of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) have driven the advances in maritime monitoring systems in the last decade. Given the enormous volume of vessel data continuously being generated, real-time analysis of vessel behaviors is only possible because of decision support systems provided with event and anomaly detection methods. However, current works on vessel event detection are ad-hoc methods able to handle only a single or a few predefined types of vessel behavior. Most of the existing approaches do not learn from the data and require the definition of queries and rules for describing each behavior. In this paper, we discuss challenges and opportunities in classical machine learning and deep learning for vessel event and anomaly detection.

Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Methods for Autonomous Vessels in 2D Environments

Unmanned Surface Vehicles technology (USVs) is an exciting topic that essentially deploys an algorithm to safely and efficiently performs a mission. Although reinforcement learning is a well-known approach to modeling such a task, instability and divergence may occur when combining off-policy and function approximation. In this work, we used deep reinforcement learning combining Q-learning with a neural representation to avoid instability. Our methodology uses deep q-learning and combines it with a rolling wave planning approach on agile methodology. Our method contains two critical parts in order to perform missions in an unknown environment. The first is a path planner that is responsible for generating a potential effective path to a destination without considering the details of the root. The latter is a decision-making module that is responsible for short-term decisions on avoiding obstacles during the near future steps of USV exploitation within the context of the value function. Simulations were performed using two algorithms: a basic vanilla vessel navigator (VVN) as a baseline and an improved one for the vessel navigator with a planner and local view (VNPLV). Experimental results show that the proposed method enhanced the performance of VVN by 55.31% on average for long-distance missions. Our model successfully demonstrated obstacle avoidance by means of deep reinforcement learning using planning adaptive paths in unknown environments.

Wise Sliding Window Segmentation: A classification-aided approach for trajectory segmentation

Large amounts of mobility data are being generated from many different sources, and several data mining methods have been proposed for this data. One of the most critical steps for trajectory data mining is segmentation. This task can be seen as a pre-processing step in which a trajectory is divided into several meaningful consecutive sub-sequences. This process is necessary because trajectory patterns may not hold in the entire trajectory but on trajectory parts. In this work we propose a supervised trajectory segmentation algorithm, called Wise Sliding Window Segmentation (WS-II). It processes the trajectory coordinates to find behavioral changes in space and time, generating an error signal that is further used to train a binary classifier for segmenting trajectory data. This algorithm is flexible and can be used in different domains. We evaluate our method over three real datasets from different domains (meteorology, fishing, and individuals movements), and compare it with four other trajectory segmentation algorithms: OWS, GRASP-UTS, CB-SMoT, and SPD. We observed that the proposed algorithm achieves the highest performance for all datasets with statistically significant differences in terms of the harmonic mean of purity and coverage.
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Publications