nquiringminds has won “Most Innovative Idea” at the Ministry of Defence’s AI Hackathon on “Enabling Defence Decisions” held on 28-29 November 2017 at the Geovation centre, London.
The challenge set was how to employ AI techniques to analyse Navy Command Automatic Identification System datasets to detect anomalies in shipping patterns. In short, to greater enable the Navy’s identification of friend or foe? The winning demo is available online here.
Currently this activity consumes a lot of Naval officers’ time and is open to human error. Alexandru Mereacre and Ivan Glautier from nquiringminds used innovative AI techniques trained on AIS histrorical datasets to enable anomaly detection allowing the Royal Navy to classify potential threatening vessels as they make their way across global waters.
nquiringminds’ solution focuses on reducing the volume of data that Royal Navy officers need to process as well as providing a useful tool to analyse the remaining data. Typically a patrol boat will sit in an area for a period of time and monitor all AIS data using onboard sensors, over a course of eight hours they may see well over one hundred different vessels.
The nquiringminds’ tool, built using the TDX (Trusted Data Exchange) took the automatic identification system (AIS) data from these vessels and identified anomalous trajectories based on GPS coordinates, acceleration and AIS ping frequency. The identified trajectories were based on metrics used by British navy officers in the field. The result was a reduced sample of vessel trajectories in an interactive graphical interface. The operator could then query the vessels that had been flagged by our tool and gain further details on the position, speed and bearing of the vessel under investigation. The tool also allowed estimation of time of arrival for rapid decision making.
The tool was built rapidly using the nquiringminds’ TDX platform. Using this platform allowed the team to import and analyse huge volumes of real time data very quickly.
nquiringminds’ Head of Systems Engineering, Alexandru Mereacre said “Using AI to enable better detection will allow Naval resources to be more efficiently deployed to solve other issues elsewhere.”
nquiringminds senior software engineer Ivan Glautier said “Advanced machine learning control systems are perfect for this sort of problem and easily implemented using our Trusted Data Exchange platform”.
The Ministry of Defence AI hackathon attracted many participants from the Defence Industry and against such competition nquiringminds are proud to have won the award for “Most Innovative Idea”.
About nquiringminds
nquiringminds are experts in AI powered Analytics, Secure Data Sharing and Cyber Resilient Internet of Things
nquiringminds are an Open Data Champion recognized by the UK Cabinet Office and have been nominated for a Parliamentary Award for innovation in productivity. In 2014 Cisco identified nquiringminds as a Top 15 company in IOT. The UK government has awarded nquiringMinds the contract to provide the Data Integration platform for its Future City Solutions Program.
Visit us: www.nqminds.com
Press contact: info@nquiringminds.com
View demo: https://ais.nqminds.com
NquiringMinds wins MOD Artificial Intelligence Hackathon “Enabling Defence Decisions”
