The CMCC organizes a seminar with Dr. Michele Vespe (European Commission Joint Research Centre – JRC), to be held in Lecce at the Ocean Lab’s premises.

The seminar is entitled “Mapping activities at sea using maritime surveillance data” and is scheduled for Tuesday, July 21 (h. 10.00 – 11.30 a.m.).

Michele Vespe is a scientific officer and project leader at the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), where he works on maritime surveillance sensors, data fusion and maritime situational awareness.
Between 2011 and 2013 he was a Senior Scientist at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE, formerly NURC), working on traffic knowledge discovery, anomaly detection and networked radar systems. Until September 2011 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the JRC developing Synthetic Aperture Radar based pre-operational applications in the maritime domain. He also led exploratory research on passive radar systems. Prior to this, he spent two years in industry as a project engineer in the fields of remote sensing, small and medium area surveillance and data fusion.
He holds a degree in telecommunications engineering form University of Florence (2003) and a Ph.D. in signal processing from University College London (2006).

Abstract
Newly developed surveillance systems and technologies (such as AIS, LRIT, SAR, etc.) have reached operational maturity, leading to a level of information that often enables the detection and tracking of vessels of interest at global scale. Nevertheless, the knowledge of the spatial distribution of vessels at sea is not always sufficient to achieve useful understanding of their activities.
The developments of the JRC platform (Blue Hub) will be introduced, covering data fusion, knowledge discovery and spatial data mining techniques. The platform aims to deliver decision support and intelligence elements for situational prediction, anomaly detection, activity mapping and trend analysis (e.g. shipping routes, fishing grounds, etc.).
This research area is designed to serve i) operational authorities in enhancing maritime situational awareness and ii) policy makers by providing tools for impact assessment or evaluation of initiatives in transport safety and security, maritime spatial planning, fishing pressure on habitats, fisheries socioeconomics, emissions and risks from pollution.