Focus Area #8 - NAVY TECHNOLOGY ACCELERATION - Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Develop Capabilities and Impact Mission Succe

Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages are a rich source of data for situational awareness of maritime surface vessels and identification of potentially anomalous vessels, however they are too voluminous and heterogeneously sequenced for a human operator and traditional compute algorithms to make sense of at a regional scale. While these challenges can limit the effectiveness of traditional AIS data processing methods to detect anomalous maritime surface vessel behavior, advanced machine learning methods, specifically Neural Networks, may prove more successful. Blue Ridge Envisioneering (BRE) proposes a multi-stage Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that addresses these challenges in identifying anomalous ship behavior. Using AIS messages from U.S. coastal waters provided by the marinecadastre.gov team, we will train this network to detect anomalies and will characterize performance across a variety of geographic regions.