Ships

Brought to you by the Institute for Security Science and Technology (ISST) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), this event will have two briefings on how ship AIS (automatic identification system) data can be used and misused.

Since 2004, AIS systems have been compulsory for vessels over 300 tonnes for safety and vessel monitoring for commercial purposes. The large amounts of data generated create challenges in data analysis for vessel tracking etc. but also present sources of open-source intelligence. At the same time, AIS data can be misused in illicit activities in a variety of contexts, including vessel identification swapping for sanctions evasion.

The two talks will introduce work on this topic which is ongoing at Imperial College London and the Royal United Services Institute. There will be time for a Q&A after the talks.

The event is open to anyone interested in the topics of AIS data, data analysis and open-source intelligence. We especially encourage early career academics / professionals to attend.

Briefings summaries and speaker bios

Talk 1: Distributed Processing of Maritime Trajectory Data

The talk will focus on how to leverage the power of distributed computing to enable efficient and scalable processing of trajectory datasets, specifically maritime AIS datasets. We first provide a short introduction to AIS data generation before briefly discuss the importance of distributed computing for processing large AIS datasets. We then present our ideas on how to design a distributed system for AIS trajectories with our work on distance joins. Finally, we provide some ideas for future works.

Speaker bio: Guang Yang is a PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, under the supervision of Dr Thomas Heinis. His work focuses on distributed systems, learned based indexes, databases, big data management and the application of big data to traffic and maritime sectors. Guang previously completed his MEng degree with first-class honours in the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College London.

Talk 2: AIS Manipulation, Illicit Activity and OSINT (open-source intelligence)

This talk will focus on the ways illicit actors evade methods of tracking vessels for illicit activity. It will also look at recent advances in AIS manipulation and discuss several security implications for these developments.

Speaker bio: Joe Byrne is a Research Analyst in the Proliferation and Nuclear Policy team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

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