Illegal Fishing and Data Sense-Making
The FedInvent Patent Newsletter for New Patents Issued on January 18, 2021
Hello from FedInvent,
On Tuesday, January 18, 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted 5,536 new patents. One hundred benefited from taxpayer funding. A slow start in the new year.
Here are the links to the Tuesday FedInvent Patent Report and the Details Page that lets you browse by department.
Policy-Driven Innovation
The federal innovation ecosphere is the domain of statutory, regulatory, and policy-driven science and technology. The latest patent from HRL Laboratories is an example of how policy-driven science and technology lead to policy-driven inventions.
Sense-Making for a Data Bonanza
This week's patent includes 11227162, "Multi-layer information dynamics for activity and behavior detection," from HRL Laboratories. The title does not say much about the invention. The Detailed Description does. The invention in the patent is technology for the integration of vast stores of complex data from disparate sources and compiling it in time and space to facilitate tracking illegal fishing and the dark fleet responsible for it.
The patent addresses one of the epic challenges when dealing with big data, figuring out how to make sense. Sense-making inventions are the new frontier of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and hyper-scale data aggregation. The most compelling need among intelligence and military analysts is a better way of making sense of all of this data. If you wonder who is leading the pack in the federal ecosphere, look to the intelligence community.
Illegal fishing, called IUU fishing in policy documents, covers illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. IUU fishing is a broad term that generally includes activities that violate national law or international fishing regulations or agreements. IUU fishing is also a vehicle for transnational organized crime, slavery and forced labor, human trafficking, smuggling, money laundering and tax evasion. The table below from GAO shows the common forms of IUU fishing,
The explosion of new, low-cost technology and the data it creates facilitates new ways to identify, interdict, investigate, prosecute, and dismantle IUU fishing operations and organizations perpetrating and knowingly benefitting from it. Intelligence and law enforcement entities need to make sense of terabytes of data from:
New space-based assets.
Camera-equipped Cube Sats. Cube Sats are small, and inexpensive satellites continuously take night light and other fishing activity pictures.
Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) sensors ping signals down to Earth and use the information bouncing back to generate radar images. Although these radar pictures lack the detail of optical images and cannot currently be used to identify specific vessels, they can detect the presence of any ship in the ocean, day or night, whatever the weather.
NASA's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument collects visible and infrared imagery and global observations of land, atmosphere, cryosphere, and oceans.
Automated Identification System (AIS) data identifies ships and, perhaps more importantly, spoofed AIS data and incidents where AIS systems are turned off.
Cloud and data sets from commercial data aggregators
Vast databases port visit logs, and fishing industry supply chain data created by the government and commercial data aggregators.
Extensive social media communication data among and between IUU fishing operators.
This is a data bonanza.
The inventors at HRL Laboratories have patented an invention that addresses both the data bonanza and the need for sense-making. The invention enables spatial and temporal data analysis and understanding of how and when this data intersects. Data is presented in time and space (location). This multi-layer data integration scheme enables analysts to predict future behavior and develop strategies to intervene.
The invention recognizes the "flows" as a common information unit across appears within heterogeneous data sources. The multi-layer information dynamics network defined in the patent enables detecting "coordinated movements" and "silence before actions" for illegal fishing maritime activities.
"Coordinated movements" refers to the coordination of fleets of vessels, where each vessel has a specific task. For example, one vessel coordinates fleet movements to patrol areas where fishing is not allowed. Another vessel might be designated to direct fleet dispersal in the event of contact with authorities. "Silence before actions" refers to rogue fishers who turn off their radios before entering restricted fishing zones. The IUU operators go dark before the law-breaking commences.
The invention can model IUU fishing data to capture the supply-chain network and social network communication, in addition to maritime activity data obtained via conventional sensors. A supply-chain network layer models logistics of fishing activities, such as vessels (e.g., fuel orders, fishing supplies) from port authorities' data, fishery products (e.g., processing, distribution, retails) from port factory and traffic data, and fishery product demand-supply from fishery import/export data.
A social network layer models social communications of fishing company employees, such as fishing crews, port workers, drivers, and market/restaurant customers in social media and open-source data. The purpose of the social network layer is to consider social relations among agents (e.g., fishers, crews, truck drivers, customers) involved in fishing and related fishery production and consumption activities.
Maritime activities are modeled with three network layers: vessel movements, communications, and fishery transports. The three-layer network modeling of maritime activity captures communications, vessels, and fishery flows transported among zones within each layer and coordinated flows between layers.
The aggregation and integration of the data can also help investigators define economic and social indicators to detect and predict illegal fishing activities and behaviors. (The IUU fishing operators have to eventually get the fish off the ship and into the food supply chain. They use Twitter and What's App too.)
If illegal fishing is detected or inferred, the system can transmit instructions to cause a mobile platform, like an unmanned aerial vehicle or a satellite, to maneuver and direct sensors to the location and capture imagery of the location. For example, the system can cause a network-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to travel to the location of the illegal fishing and capture imagery of the location with a video camera. The system can also transmit instructions to a satellite to direct one or more sensors and capture imagery of the location from the Earth's orbit.
The HRL Laboratories' temporal and spatial data flow "sense-making" technology's use to combat IUU fishing is just one example of how this invention can be deployed. The invention would be equally effective in tracking drug cartels' activities, human traffickers, purveyors of child pornography, smuggling of counterfeit products, money laundering and tax evasion.
Who Funded This Patent?
The intelligence community is a critical player in combating IUU fishing. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in cooperation with the Navy and the Coast Guard, created the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO). NIMIO leverages the intelligence community to support targeted law enforcement operations and investigations; analyze and share IUU fishing information; and uncover vessel owners, criminal organizations, and flag states that undermine global fisheries management efforts.
This patent has the usual hide in plain sight mumbo-jumbo contract information. We assume that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) funded HRL Laboratories' work based on the government interest statement. NRO is a Department of Defense (DOD) agency and a member of the Intelligence Community. NRO designs, builds, launches, and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the US federal government, and provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the NSA, imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the NGA, and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the DIA.
The November 2021 GAO report on Combating Illegal Fishing is available here.
There is another important policy priority on IUU fishing. It is expected that IUU fishing will expand as climate change depletes traditional fishing locations.
Patents By The Numbers
This week USPTO granted 5,563 new patents. One hundred benefited from taxpayer funding. Here are the numbers.
Ninety-six (96) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Twenty-one (21) have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
A federal department is the only assignee on 11 patents. One patent had both the Army and the Navy as the assignees, an unusual occurrence.
The 100 new patents have 106 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 352 inventors.
The 342 American inventors come from 31 states and the District of Columbia.
The ten (10) foreign inventors come from four (4) countries, including three inventors from the People's Republic of China.
There are 51 patents (51%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Six patents (6) resulted from the collaboration between two universities.
Two patents (2) resulted from the collaboration between three universities.
A foreign university was granted one new patent.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received ten (10) patents.
Four (4) patents were assigned Y CPC symbols indicating that the invention may be useful in mitigating the impact of climate change.
The Big Three States:
California has 22 first-named inventors and 91 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 13 first-named inventors and 36 total inventors.
Maryland has five (5) first-named inventors and 24 total inventors.
Patent Count By Department
Patents By Technology Center
The Technology Centers where the 100 patents granted this week were examined are in the chart below.
The Health Complex
The table below shows the number of funding citations where the recipient cites the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, the Health Complex.
Before We Go
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The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.