Papers for

maritime operations teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Harbormaster ensures reliable maritime anomaly alerts on AWS

Harbormaster: Evidence-Gated, Replay-Safe Maritime Anomaly Detection on AWS

Abstract: Ships broadcast their positions through the Automatic Identification System (AIS), and those reports can be false or missing. An operator who acts on an anomaly alert needs that alert to be attributable, reviewable, and recoverable after a failure. This paper describes Harbormaster, a production-shaped system on AWS that follows three rules. Physics checks run on every report before any learned model runs. The DynamoDB read store is an idempotent projection of PostgreSQL, and a guard on the log sequence number (LSN) of each change protects every write to it. A candidate model must pass a holdout gate and a shadow comparison before a canary gives it traffic, and a burn-rate check guards each canary step. The paper proves that replaying any prefix or suffix of the change log leaves each projected key at the value of its highest applied LSN. It also notes effects this result does not cover, such as repeated cache invalidations and repeated audit rows. In a bounded AWS window, a one-hour soak returned 35,999 HTTP 200 responses to 36,000 requests, with a 95th-percentile (p95) client latency of 142.751 ms. In a separate bounded AWS run of 900 s, the stream path received a burst of 400 records/s, and its consumer lag later drained to zero. Every number in the paper carries a label that says where it was measured, and the paper lists the parts of the design that were never built.

Wed 30 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Ships broadcast their positions, but sometimes these messages are wrong or missing, which can cause problems. The authors created Harbormaster, a system that checks each ship report for obvious errors before analyzing it. Their system carefully manages data updates on AWS so alerts are accurate, reviewable, and can recover from failures. They tested it with realistic data bursts and showed it handles them efficiently while keeping data consistent.
Open → 2610.00519v1

Maritime operators emphasize trust and transparency in AI tools

Understanding Operator Attitudes Toward AI-Supported Decision Making in Maritime Operations

Abstract: Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and AI- supported decision assistants are expected to transform maritime operations, but their safe integration depends on how maritime professionals perceive and trust such systems. This paper presents a survey study on maritime stakeholders' attitudes toward an AI-supported assistant in collision-avoidance scenarios. Participants evaluated technology anxiety, trust in automation, and explanation quality using established and adapted questionnaires, complemented by sentiment and thematic analysis of open-ended responses Results indicate a generally positive disposition toward maritime technology, no clear age-related differences in openness, stable trust across scenarios, and more scenario-sensitive, multidimensional explanation ratings. Open responses showed that participants valued support for decision-making, situation awareness, and confidence-building, while raising concerns about AI reliability, over- reliance and loss of expertise. The findings suggest that maritime AI systems should not focus solely on increasing automation or trust, but on supporting calibrated reliance through transparent, reliable, and operationally meaningful design with domain experts in the loop.

Thu 10 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Maritime professionals were asked how they feel about using AI helpers to avoid collisions at sea. The study found they generally trust and like technology but worry about losing their own skills or relying too much on AI. They want AI systems that explain their actions clearly and work reliably. The authors suggest designing AI that supports decision-making with expert oversight rather than just increasing automation.
Open → 2609.11805v1