The problem
Thousands of vessels deliberately go dark each year, disabling AIS to conceal illegal fishing, sanctions evasion, and ship-to-ship transfers. Enforcement agencies see those blackouts as gaps on a map with no context and no evidence to act on. Maritime domain awareness ends where the signal stops.
What wake.ai does
wake.ai detects suspicious dark activity in vessel traffic data and converts it into a ranked, evidence-backed queue of interdiction leads.
- Presence replay. Replay over a million hourly Global Fishing Watch vessel positions on an interactive map and reconstruct any vessel's observed history.
- Investigation queue. Scored dark events with observed endpoints, kinematically reconstructed geometry, and feasible areas of activity.
- Ship Intelligence. An embedded AI reasoning layer that synthesizes any case or vessel into an evidence-grade intelligence report, answers questions in context, and exports a briefing for the chain of command. Every statement comes from cited source records.
Built for the analyst
The maritime enforcement analyst has twenty minutes to decide which of hundreds of blackouts deserves a patrol asset or a sanctions referral. By using ML inference and trajectory reconstruction, every lead is a report that can be handed to a supervisor or a lawyer.
The engine
Global Fishing Watch and NOAA AIS data are fused through a kinematic feasibility engine that reconstructs where each dark vessel could physically have been and for how long. A spatiotemporal permutation null model separates anomalous behavior from background traffic, and an ensemble of model-based scoring components produces an explainable risk score with full provenance. Embedded large language models reasons over the assembled evidence on a bounded retrieval context.
Beyond the hackathon
The architecture scales from public data to operational feeds: commercial raw-AIS vectors, SAR and optical imagery, and VIIRS night-light detections plug in as corroboration sources. The deployment path is coast guards, underwriters, fisheries enforcement, and sanctions-compliance teams, cueing patrol assets and producing referral-ready evidence packages.
