The maritime domain is nowadays essential to the world’s economy because the sea represents the most effective way to move goods worldwide. In addition, thousands of vessels cross global waters every month involving the transportation of human beings. As some vessels may be engaged in illegal, illicit or dangerous activities, maritime transport and port safety and security have become a major concern.
The growing number of remote sensors and ship reporting technologies (e.g. Automatic Identification System – AIS, Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT), radar tracks, Earth Observation) are generating an overwhelming amount of spatiotemporal and geographically distributed data related to vessels and their movements. Research on reliable data mining techniques has proven essential to the discovery of knowledge from such increasingly available information on ship traffic at sea. This includes the characterisation of vessel behaviours, the understanding and mapping of activities at sea, the analysis of their trends over time. Data driven knowledge discovery has very recently demonstrated its value in fields that go beyond the original maritime safety and security remits of such data. They include, but are not limited to, fisheries management, maritime spatial planning, gridding ship emissions, mapping activities at sea, risk assessment of offshore platforms, trade indicators. The extraction of useful information from maritime Big Data is thus a key element in providing operational authorities, policy-makers and scientists with supporting tools to understand what is happening at sea and improve maritime knowledge.
The first MDDM Workshop aims at gathering scientists, researchers and practitioners to establish a venue where exchange ideas, discuss solutions, promote collaborations to exploit such unprecedented opportunities for data mining and machine learning cross-disciplinary research.
The workshop is co-located with the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2016) and will be held on December 12th, 2016, in Barcelona, Spain.