Atmanand M A, Jay Pearlman, Christopher Whitt, UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development
This article discusses the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and the planned involvement of the OES, to include our OCEANS and other conferences and events.
The ocean is essential to the Earth’s ecosystem and sustain- ability. It absorbs greenhouse gases, influences weather, is an energy resource, provides food and jobs, and many other factors relevant for human sustenance. Peter Thompson, United Nations (UN) special envoy for the ocean said that “Ocean science, supported by capacity development, is essential not only to inform Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) but also other SDGs that have an ocean dimension.”
Achieving sustainability is a global challenge that must include and go beyond national interests. It involves both natural and human impacts on the ocean ecosystem that have created challenges. Overfishing and bycatch, marine debris, contamination and loss of marine biodiversity are widely acknowledged. The United Nations’ First World Ocean Assessment in 2016 1,2 found that much of the ocean is now seriously degraded.
To address this requires expanded approaches to governance and to ocean knowledge. The UN has taken an active interest in facilitating governance discussions for the oceans. For example, the UN is furthering discussions for an international, legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction 3. Since the seas beyond national jurisdiction make up 40 percent of the surface of our planet, as well as 64 percent of the surface of the oceans, the sustainability of marine ecosystems in this region is a priority. The priorities must, of course, also include waters within national jurisdiction. Given the vastness of the oceans and their complexity, particularly in coastal waters (national jurisdictions), the challenge of observing, quantifying, and understanding the oceans requires a major initiative of global scale. Action can only be effective if it is based on sound knowledge informed by science and engineering.
Recognizing that humanity is at a pivotal point, on December 5, 2017, the UN declared 2021-2030 as the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (the “Ocean Decade”), which is focused on the “science we need for the ocean we want.”4 The Ocean Decade will provide the framework for international cooperation and actions needed to develop the scientific research, engineering, and innovative technologies that can connect ocean science with the needs of society. These actions will connect our research and applications to areas such as coastal zone management, marine spatial planning, and marine protected areas, fisheries management, early warning systems, development of national ocean policies and R&D research strategies, and regional and national capacity development planning. This involves contributions across geographic regions, across generations, and across regions of differing resources and infrastructure. It involves new technologies such as low-cost autonomous vehicles, newer observation platforms, cost-effective ocean renewables, new underwater communications, expanded interoperability, increased data accessibility, and new analysis and modeling techniques.
Achieving significant advances during a single decade requires clear and reasonable objectives and a path to achieve these to the level that they will impact society. The objectives have been grouped into desired outcomes. These are5:
• A clean ocean where sources of pollution are identified and removed
• A healthy and resilient ocean where marine ecosystems are mapped and protected
• A predictable ocean where society has the capacity to under-stand current and future ocean conditions
• A safe ocean where people are protected from ocean hazards
• A sustainably harvested ocean ensuring the provision of food supply
• A transparent ocean with open access to data, information and technologies
• An inspiring and engaging ocean where society understands and values the ocean
The actions in each of these will be built on a foundation of interoperability and knowledge sharing including information management, standards and best practices, and capacity development. Oceanic engineering of observing systems, their components, and information management is essential for achieving these objectives.
The UN Decade is meant to inspire all stakeholders to take action to achieve the seven outcomes cited above. There is a strong need to have engineering intervention at many levels. The current style of “business as usual” is to be modified drastically. Engineering innovations could:
• reduce pollution such as plastics, chemicals, fertilizers,
• reduce capital costs of renewable ocean energy technologies like wave, offshore wind, thermal energy conversion,
• reduce operations cost of scientific observations due to ship time and related infrastructure,
• improve remote observations technologies,
• make managing and analysing large datasets more efficient and accessible, and
• standardize observations and enable better ocean management, amongst many other possibilities.
Our engineering community must engage broadly with scientists and end-users to co-design the changes necessary for integrated, interoperable global actions working across disciplines and cultures6. What, then, is the role of IEEE OES in the Ocean Decade?
We will contribute to the Ocean Decade in many ways, which for now we group into two major categories: bringing the Ocean Decade to oceanic engineering, and bringing oceanic engineering to the Ocean Decade.
Bringing the Ocean Decade to oceanic engineering involves raising awareness among students, professions, companies and institutions. This could include things like special sessions and keynote presentations at our conferences and workshops. Indeed, such events are already planned for OCEANS 2021 and OCEANS 2022. There could also be local events and activities, so if your chapter or other group would like to have more information or find expert speakers, OES can help.
Bringing oceanic engineering to the Ocean Decade means inspiring our members, students, companies, institutions and other agencies to take new actions to innovate and build technologies that help achieve the Ocean Decade goals. Some ways to achieve this might be recognitions for innovations that align with Ocean Decade outcomes (for example, technical presentations or paper prizes, or recognitions for industrial innovations during OCEANS exhibitions). A key element of the Ocean Decade is co-design, so there will also be focused workshops at both OES conferences, as well as at selected science conferences organized by other associations that will bring together experts from both science and engineering.
There are definitely more activities than we have been yet able to conceive and plan. We want to see activities at all levels of OES, including local chapters. To sustain long-term Ocean Decade involvement, OES has established an Ocean Decade committee, and planned a funding initiative for 2022 (and hopefully beyond—throughout the decade). The funding initiative will support the volunteer work to implement the activities described above, as well as have incentives for new ideas and initiatives that our members and chapters suggest, to start with. The next generation will bear the brunt of climate change and the related outcomes and so they are key stakeholders in the Ocean Decade. This is recognized by the prominence of the Ocean Decade Early Career Ocean Professional (ECOP) program, as well as a strong emphasis on ocean literacy and munity engagement.
Our Young Professionals (YPs) have long been involved with existing OES activities that already contribute to ocean awareness and education by participating in various student outreach activities around the world, such as the Singapore AUV Challenge and the European Robotics League. These YPs are also working with Ocean Decade ECOPs to bring the voice of the youth to the movement. One such event was the recently held Virtual ECOPs Day on 1st-2nd June7. We highlighted our YPs involvement with Earthzine, SAUVC, ERL, and in helping organize workshops and symposia. You can watch the video we presented here (https://youtu.be/JnU2gr4hGLg). and see our impression at the V.ECOP day 2021 Story map. We also par-Summit on how to engage ECOPs in this movement. An ECOP programme has been officially endorsed by the IOC and Ocean Decade8, led by an informal working group for ECOPs. If you are interested in participating in YP/ECOP activities specifically, please contact Hari Vishnu (tmshv@nus.edu.sg).
The potential is huge for OES to catalyze engineering contributions to the Ocean. However, this requires support from many volunteers of IEEE OES. We need volunteers who can support these activities in their region and technical area. Volunteers are requested to complete the google form9 indicating your willingness. We will form appropriate groups and take it forward on a large scale.
1 https://www.un.org/regularprocess/content/first-world-ocean-assessment
2 Front. Mar. Sci., 06 June 2019 https://doi.org/10.3389/ fmars.2019.00298
3 https://www.un.org/bbnj/
4 https://www.oceandecade.org/about
5 https://www.oceandecade.org/about?tab=our-story
6 Pearlman, et al., Front. Mar. Sci., 05 May 2021 https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.619685
7 https://vecop.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ VECOP- Program.pdf
8 https://www.oceandecade.org/resource/166/Announcement-of-the-results-of-the-first-endorsed-Decade-Actions-following-Call-for-Decade-Actions-No-012020 – intro
9 https://forms.gle/4xiHqTQTRLApyHUz7
Suleman Mazhar has been working as a professor in Information & Communication Engineering at Harbin Engineering University (China) since July 2019. He did PhD from Tokyo University (Japan) and postdoctorate from Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA). He had BS-CS from FAST-NUCES (Lahore) and MS from GIK Institute (Pakistan). He is TYSP young scientist fellow (Ministry of Science & Technology China) and have won several research grants from international organizations such as DAAD (Germany), ICIMOD (Nepal), NRPU (Higher Education Commission Pakistan), WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Pakistan. His research focus is deep learning and signal processing applications for environmental monitoring, with particular focus on underwater acoustics, and marine mammal conservation. He is a reviewer for professional journals such as Journal of Acoustical Society (America), IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE Sensors Journal, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Peng Ren is a full professor with the College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China). He is the director of Qingdao International Research Center for Intelligent Forecast and Detection of Oceanic Catastrophes. He received the K. M. Scott Prize from the University of York, the Natural Science award (first rank) from China Institute of Electronics, and the Eduardo Caianiello Best Student Paper Award from 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing as one co-author. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
Mohd Rizal Arshad is a full professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, where he specializes in ocean robotics technology and intelligent system. He received his B.Eng. in Medical Electronics & Instrumentation and PhD in Electronic Engineering from University of Liverpool, UK in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He completed his MSc. in Electronic Control Engineering from the University of Salford, UK in Dec 1995. He has supervised many postgraduate students and published extensively in local and international publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and was awarded IEEE OES Presidential Award in 2019.
Itzik Klein is an Assistant Professor, heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) Editorial Board. Prior to joining the University of Haifa, he worked at leading companies in Israel on navigation topics for more than 15 years. He has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and autonomous underwater vehicles.
John R. Potter (IEEE M’94, SM’02, F’18) graduated in the previous century with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge, UK studying Antarctic ice mass balance, where he spent four consecutive summers. This work helped underscore the non-linear fragility of polar ice to climate change and led to him receiving the Polar Medal from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Nick is a Visiting Fellow at the UK National Oceanographic Center, Southampton His nomination was endorsed by the Underwater Acoustics Technology Committee. He had worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer at University of Birmingham and has been working as a Research Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin. He has also served as a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research Global. He is a senior member of IEEE (OES) and a Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Nick has also been serving as Assoc. Editor for IEEE JoE and JASA. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise are seabed acoustics, parametric array modeling, sonar beamformer, underwater signal processing.
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.
He has developed various types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and related application technologies including navigation methods, a new sensing method using a chemical sensor, precise seafloor mapping methods, a precise seabed positioning system with a resolution of a few centimeters, a new sensing system of the thickness of cobalt-rich crust; and more. He has shown, by using these technologies that AUVs are practicable and valuable tools for deep-sea exploration.
Donna Kocak has had an outstanding career in defense and scientific projects developing and applying solutions in subsea optics, imaging and robotics. She graduated with an M.Sc in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of Central Florida; an MBA in 2008 from the University of Florida; and M.Sc in Industrial Engineering in 2011 from the University of Central Florida. She is currently a Senior Scientist, Advanced Concepts Engineering, and Fellow at the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, where she has developed novel optical imaging and communication solutions for under-sea defense and scientific projects. Prior to 2008 Donna Kocak was Founder and President of Green Sky Imaging, LLC (GSI) who developed laser/video photogrammetry software for underwater inspection and survey. Her earlier career positions were with Naval Training Systems Center, Florida; Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Florida; eMerge Interactive; and the Advanced Technologies Group in Florida.
John Potter has a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics from Bristol University in the UK and a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography from the University of Cambridge on research in the Antarctic, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal in 1988. John has worked on polar oceanography, underwater acoustics, ambient noise (including imaging), marine mammals, communications, IoUT, autonomous vehicles and strategic development. He has 40 years’ international experience working at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK, NATO in Italy, SIO in California, NUS in Singapore and most recently at NTNU in Norway. John is a Fellow of the IEEE and MTS, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturer, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer & an International Fellow of the Explorer’s Club.
Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.