Navy Lab’s PROTEUS Provides AI-Powered Maritime Awareness

The Naval Research Laboratory’s PROTEUS program is a cutting-edge maritime domain awareness system designed to provide near-real-time global maritime situational awareness for agencies and partners. The program integrates multi-source data ingestion and fusion services to identify, query and filter maritime vessels based on user-defined criteria.

During Sea-Air-Space 2025, Alan Hope, head of the NRL’s mission development branch, spoke to GovCIO Media & Research about how Homeland Security Investigations, the Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration and other agencies are using PROTEUS to fulfill their mission.

Hope says that PROTEUS is crucial assist to human analysts at agencies, using AI to sift through vast datasets to highlight potential threats and anomalies, which allows experts to focus on validation and decision-making rather than raw data interpretation.

Hope also talks about the PROTEUS user experience, highlighting the cloud-based, easily accessible workbench that provides real-time updates and historical data for in-depth analysis, fostering collaboration among users across different agencies and locations.