Michele Vespe

European Commission | ec · Joint Research Centre (JRC)

Several research initiatives have been undertaken to map fishing effort at high spatial resolution using the Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). An alternative to the VMS is represented by the Automatic Identification System (AIS), which in the EU became compulsory in May 2014 for all fishing vessels of length above 15 meters. The aim of this paper is...

The analysis of the declining impact of piracy on maritime routes and vessel behaviours in the Indian Ocean is here performed using Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) reports. A 5-year archive of vessel position data covering the period characterized by the highest number of attacks and the subsequent decline provides a unique source for...

The improvement in Maritime Situational Awareness, the capability of understanding events, circumstances, and activities within and impacting the maritime environment, is nowadays of paramount importance for safety and security. The integration of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data and automatic identification system (AIS) information h...

The automatic identification system (AIS), a ship reporting system originally designed for collision avoidance, is becoming a cornerstone of maritime situational awareness. The recent increase of terrestrial networks and satellite constellations of receivers is providing global tracking data that enable a wide spectrum of applications beyond collis...

Understanding maritime traffic patterns is key to Maritime Situational Awareness applications, in particular, to classify and predict activities. Facilitated by the recent build-up of terrestrial networks and satellite constellations of Automatic Identification System (AIS) receivers, ship movement information is becoming increasingly available, bo...

The phenomenon of Business-to-Government (B2G) data sharing represents a growing trend, especially in latest years. In fact, research has shown how privately held data could have a huge potential when used to tackle societal policy issues. B2G data sharing initiatives can be employed in different situations: from emergencies to the construction of...

The report provides a landscape analysis of key emerging types of data intermediaries. It reviews and syntheses current academic and policy literature, with the goal of identifying shared elements and definitions. An overall objective is to contribute to establishing a common vocabulary among EU policy makers, experts, and practitioners. Six types...

This report distils technical and organisational lessons learned from the scientific work of the JRC that can inform the scoping and implementation of common European data spaces as envisioned by the European Strategy for data. Those lessons stem from JRC’s long term commitment and relevant research. The audience targeted by this report comprises p...

The vast amount of data produced everyday (so-called digital traces) and available nowadays represent a gold mine for the social sciences, especially in a computational context, that allows to fully extract their informational and knowledge value. In the latest years, statistical offices have made efforts to profit from harnessing the potential off...

Using available phylogeographical data of 3585 SARS–CoV–2 genomes we attempt at providing a global picture of the virus’s dynamics in terms of directly interpretable parameters. To this end we fit a hidden state multistate speciation and extinction model to a pre-estimated phylogenetic tree with information on the place of sampling of each strain....

Human travel fed the worldwide spread of COVID-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality. We assess whether the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of a...

The vast amount of data produced everyday (so-called 'digital traces') and available nowadays represent a gold mine for the social sciences, especially in a computational context, that allows to fully extract their informational and knowledge value. In the latest years, statistical offices have made efforts to profit from harnessing the potential o...

This Science for Policy report provides a first mapping of the policy demand side of Computational Social Science (CSS), an emerging discipline at the crossroads of data science, computational modelling and social sciences, which seeks to exploit the growing availability of digital trace data and computational potential to describe aspects of our s...

Digital interactions are nowadays often steered and controlled by technical and legal conditions defined in Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Understanding these modulating mechanisms can support policymakers to design actions to foster innovation, monitor data governance processes and ultimately steer the data value distribution.APIs are...

In this chapter, we estimate human mobility between countries worldwide on the basis of global statistics on tourism and air passenger traffic. Adjusting and merging the data from these two sources through a simple set of procedures enabled us to counter some of their individual limitations. The resulting open-access dataset, which covers more than...

The analysis of mobile phones data at regional level in the EU reveals varying patterns in mobility trends during the Covid-19 pandemic. These depend on the temporal evolution of the pandemic in each EU Member State, the measures taken at local or national level to limit the growth of the pandemic, as well as the level of urbanization and type of e...

Human travel fed the worldwide spread of Covid-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality. We assess whether the precocity and severity of Covid-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of a...

This work introduces a new concept of functional areas called Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs), i.e., the geographic zones highly interconnected according to the analysis of mobile positioning data. The MFAs do not coincide necessarily with administrative borders as they are built observing natural human mobility and, therefore, they can be used to...

The rapid spread of COVID-19 infections on a global level has highlighted the need for accurate, transparent and timely information regarding collective mobility patterns to inform de-escalation strategies as well as to provide forecasting capacity for re-escalation policies aiming at addressing further waves of the virus. Such information can be e...

The rapid spread of COVID-19 infections on a global level has highlighted the need for accurate, transparent and timely information regarding collective mobility patterns to inform de-escalation strategies as well as to provide forecasting capacity for re-escalation policies aiming at addressing further waves of the virus. Such information can be e...

This work presents the analysis of the impact of restrictions on mobility in Italy, with a focus on the period from 6 November 2020 to 31 January 2021, when a three-tier system based on different levels of risk was adopted and applied at regional level to contrast the second wave of COVID-19. The impact is first evaluated on mobility using Mobile N...

This work introduces a new concept of functional areas called Mobility Functional Areas (MFAs), i.e., the geographic zones highly interconnected according to the analysis of mobile positioning data. The MFAs do not coincide necessarily with administrative borders as they are built observing natural human mobility and, therefore, they can be used to...

Due to an unprecedented agreement with the European Mobile Network Operators, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission was in charge of collecting and analyze mobile positioning data to provide scientific evidence to policy makers to face the COVID-19 pandemic. This work introduces a live anomaly detection system for these high-frequenc...

This work presents a mobility indicator derived from fully anonymised and aggregated mobile positioning data. Even though the indicator does not provide information about the behaviour of individuals, it captures valuable insights into the mobility patterns of the population in the EU and it is expected to inform responses against the COVID-19 pand...

Due to an unprecedented agreement with the European Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission was in charge of collecting and analyze mobile positioning data to provide scientific evidence to policy makers in order to face the COVID-19 pandemic. This work introduces a live anomaly detection system fo...

The paper explores the travelling behaviour of migrant groups using Facebook audience estimates. Reduced geographical mobility is associated with increased risk of social exclusion and reduced socio-economic and psychological well-being. Facebook audience estimates are timely, openly available and cover most of the countries in the world. Facebook...

Countries in Europe took different mobility containment measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. The European Commission asked mobile network operators to share on a voluntarily basis anonymised and aggregate mobile data to improve the quality of modelling and forecasting for the pandemic at EU level. In fact, mobility data at EU scale can help und...

This work provides an analysis on the potential of aggregate and anonymised mobility data from mobile phones to explain the recent COVID-19 outbreak in Europe. The data were processed by the European Commission in collaboration with EU Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to improve the quality of modelling and forecasting for the pandemic at EU level....

The mobile nature of fishing activity entails dynamic spatial relations and dependencies between coastal communities and fishing grounds drawn by the movement of fishing vessels. Analysing these spatial relations is essential to allocate the socio-economic impact of the fishing activity into the relevant coastal communities. In addition, such spati...

Due to the coronavirus global crisis, most countries have put in place restrictive measures in order to confine the pandemia and contain the number of casualties. Among the restrictive measures, air traffic suspension is certainly quite effective in reducing the mobility on the global scale in the short term but it also has high socio-economic impa...

The main focus of this study is to collect and prepare data on air passengers traffic worldwide with the scope of analyze the impact of travel ban on the aviation sector. Based on historical data from January 2010 till October 2019, a forecasting model is implemented in order to set a reference baseline. Making use of airplane movements extracted f...

This short note provides estimates of the number of passengers that travel from China to all world airports in the period October 2019 - March 2020 on the basis of historical data. From this baseline we subtract the expected reduction in the number of passengers taking into account the temporary ban of some routes which was put in place since 23 Ja...

Human mobility across national borders is a key phenomenon of our time. At the global scale, however, we still know relatively little about the structure and nature of such transnational movements. This study uses a large dataset on monthly air passenger traffic between 239 countries worldwide from 2010 to 2018 to gain new insights into (a) mobilit...

Quantifying global international mobility patterns can improve migration governance. Despite decades of calls by the international community to improve international migration statistics, the availability of timely and disaggregated data about long-term and short-term migration at the global level is still very limited. In this study, we investigat...

Ettore Recchi, Emanuel Deutschmann and Maxime Chabriel have recently created a dataset to estimate international mobility (border crossing), on the basis of global statistics on tourism and air passenger traffic. More than 15 billion trips were counted in the years between 2011 and 2016, and the tendency is upward. These preliminary results, with a...

This document presents the contributions presented at the first internal workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI), organized by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. This workshop was held on 23rd May at the premises of the JRC in Ispra (Italy), with video-conference to all JRC's sites. The workshop aimed to gather JRC special...

This report is an initiative of the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the science and knowledge service of the European Commission (EC), supported by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO). It highlights drivers shaping the urban future, identifying both the key challenges cities will have to address and the streng...

Monitoring open crowded areas is fundamental for policy makers to set up the proper measures for people security and safety. Different techniques have been developed to tackle this issue. The most relevant approaches, which are currently available to estimate the number of attenders, are based on the size of the area hosting the event, the count of...

We devise an integrated estimate of country-to-country cross-border human mobility on the basis of global statistics on tourism and air passenger traffic. The joint use of these two sources allows us to (a) test for their relative contribution, and (b) correct for their limitations to the estimate of global mobility by combining them. The two sourc...

This chapter quantifies shipping intensities, and maps out shipping patterns and their changes over seasons and over years, in the Kara, Laptev and East Siberian Seas. Use is made of two main data sources: first, position reports from the AIS automatic ship reporting system, in particular using the Norwegian AIS satellites; and second, ship detecti...

Adequate knowledge of human activities in the Arctic is fundamental to support safe and secure maritime operations and sustainable development in the area. Such knowledge is often incomplete in terms of activities, geographic area and spatial resolution. For example, in the specific case of the transits over the Arctic shipping routes, such informa...

Migration is a top political priority for the European Union (EU). Data on international migrant stocks and flows are essential for effective migration management. In this report, we estimated the number of expatriates in 17 EU countries based on the number of Facebook Network users who are classified by Facebook as “expats”. To this end, we propos...

The surveillance of large sea areas normally requires the analysis of large volumes of heterogeneous, multidimensional and dynamic sensor data, in order to improve vessel traffic safety, maritime security and to protect the environment. Early detection of conflict situations at sea provides critical time to take appropriate action with, possibly be...

The growing availability of data coming from ship reporting systems, such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT), is originating an unprecedented set of opportunities to enforce maritime surveillance, ensure the security of the traffic at sea, and manage maritime operations. In this paper, a data-...

The high resolution fishing effort layer for European trawlers in the period 2014 -2015 was derived from around 150 million AIS positions reports from EU fishing vessels above 15 m of length, operating in FAO areas 27, 34 and 37, in the period between October 2014 and September 2015. Each AIS message provides the position of the vessel, its speed a...

This report is intended for anyone interesting in getting an overview of the migration data landscape at EU policymaking level. The target audience is not limited to EU policymakers, but includes other migration stakeholders, international organisations, nongovernmental organization (NGOs), and practitioners. Special emphasis is put on the role sci...

The research pointed out the feasibility of crowd monitoring through WiFi data. A methodology has been developed and tested using real data. The data were collected during the JRC Open Day 2016 by 20 WiFi access points deployed on the Ispra site. The methodology includes a cleaning procedure to identify actual users and a user localization techniqu...

Shipping is a growing source of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, which are emitted mainly over an international territory, the seas, for which only shared responsibility by all countries is felt. The international community, in particular the International Maritime Organisation, is called to look for appropriate mitigation of these emissions. T...

Political instability, conflicts and inequalities result into significant flows of people worldwide, moving to different countries in search of a better life, safety or to be reunited with their families. Irregular crossings into Europe via sea routes, despite not being new, have recently increased together with the loss of lives of people in the a...

This paper describes the main data sets that can be used to quantify trends of irregular migration and indirectly also the stock of irregular migrants in the EU. The review covers only data sets that are openly available and have supranational relevance.

Radar systems are largely employed for surveillance of wide and remote areas; the recent advent of drones gives the opportunity to exploit radar sensors on board of unmanned aerial platforms. Nevertheless, whereas drone radars are currently available for military applications, their employment in the civilian domain is still limited. The present re...

The large maritime traffic volume and its implications in economy, environment, safety, and security require an unsupervised system to monitor maritime traffic. In this paper, a method is proposed to automatically produce synthetic maritime traffic representations from historical self-reporting positioning data, more specifically from automatic ide...

Detection and localization of vessels can be carried out by exploiting the radiolocation approach. Nevertheless, the employment of radiolocalization far from the shore can be limited by the lack of enough receivers to perform a correct multi-lateration of the RF source. In order to solve this gap, mobile assets or base stations from different netwo...

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a ship reporting system based on messages broadcast by vessels carrying an AIS transponder. The recent increase of terrestrial networks and satellite constellations of receivers is making AIS one of the main sources of information for Maritime Situational Awareness activities. Nevertheless, AIS is subjec...

This paper presents results on the use of Sentinel-1 combined with satellite AIS to monitor maritime activity in the Arctic. Such activities are expected to increase, even if not uniformly across the Arctic, as the ice cover in the region retreats due to changes in climate. The objectives of monitoring efforts in the region can vary from country to...