Two MAPS Lab Papers Accepted at IEEE BigData 2025

Getting work in front of the big data community is competitive, and this year the MAPS Lab is bringing two papers to one of the field’s flagship venues.

Two papers from the lab have been accepted at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2025), held in Macau, which accepted 18% of submitted regular papers. Both contributions advance the lab’s work on maritime mobility from complementary angles.

The first, “Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Data-Driven Maritime Navigation,” led by graduate student Vaishnav Vaidheeswaran with colleagues from the lab, frames navigation as a goal-conditioned learning problem so an agent can plan routes toward a destination from data rather than fixed rules. The second, “Modeling Maritime Transportation Behavior Using AIS Trajectories and Markovian Processes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence,” models how vessels move through a busy and ecologically sensitive region using Automatic Identification System data and Markovian processes.

Together, the two papers reflect the lab’s dual focus on learning-based decision making and interpretable modeling of real maritime traffic. Congratulations to all the students and collaborators involved, and we look forward to sharing the work with the community.