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Italy Chapter
2022 IEEE OES Mediterranean PhD School
Reported byMaurizio Migliaccio, IEEE OES Italy Chapter Chairman, Riccardo Costanzi, IEEE OES Italy Chapter vice-Chairman, Giovanna Inserra, IEEE OES Italy Secretary
At the beginning of 2022 the IEEE OES Italy Chapter promoted the IEEE OES MEDITERRANEAN PhD SCHOOL. The idea to organize such an event was mainly due to a twofold reason: to promote an event a) targeted to young researchers/students and b) in which the two main technical branches (namely robotics and remote sensing) of the Chapter had the chance to meet and interact at least for some part of the time.
The first idea was to organise the event in presence in Napoli, Italy. But due to the uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a need to contact the speakers and to define all the other organising aspects well in advance in order to organise it online.
The school received the support by the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) and the event took place on the 12th and 13th of December with a rich programme including an opening plenary session followed by two parallel sessions respectively focused on Ocean Robotics and Ocean Remote Sensing.
In Figure 1, a screenshot from the opening plenary session that saw an introduction respectively to the topics of Ocean Remote Sensing provided by Prof. Maurizio Migliaccio and Ocean Robotics by Prof. Gianluca Antonelli.
The other awarded young researchers are:
Matteo Alparane – Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope
Leonardo Zacchini – Università degli Studi di Firenze
Alessio di Simone – Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”
Filippo Campagnaro – Università degli Studi di Padova
The high profile of the speakers (programme in Figure 2) that kindly accepted to contribute to the PhD school programme worked as an attractor for many attendees participating from all over the world thanks to the virtual access. Despite the school was at its first edition, 46 participants registered and 40 attended the event with a balance between the two thematic sessions. All students had the chance to take a final exam after about one month to have a formal certificate.
The programme of the school ended with a final plenary moment that, before the final remarks, included the award ceremony (Figure 3) for the IEEE OES Italy Chapter Award for young Researchers and PhD Students 2022. The call to participate in the initiative was launched in Spring 2022 and addressed the Italian researchers of maximum 35 years that, despite their young age, significantly contributed to the state of the art in the field of Oceanic Engineering. The initiative received the support of the IEEE Italy Section. The winners received a certificate and a scientific book.
The book for three young researchers was “Marine Robotics and Applications.” Editors were: Luc Jaulin, Andrea Caiti, Marc Carreras, Vincent Creuze, Frédéric Plumet, Benoît Zerr, Annick Billon-Coat, Springer and for the other two was “Physical Principles of Remote Sensing” by W.G. Rees, Cambridge University Press.
The Chapter thanks all participants and the IEEE OES for making true such an idea. The young researcher award will be proposed also in 2023 while PhD School is meant to be organized again in 2024.
Malaysia Chapter
Technical Talk on Digital Twin Ocean and ChatGPT using Omniverse Platform
Reported by Zool Hilmi Ismail, Chair of IEEE OES Malaysia Chapter
The webinar, entitled “Technical Talk of Digital Twin Ocean and ChatGPT using Omniverse Platform” was presented by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zool Hilmi Ismail, from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on April 11, 2023, at 2.00 MYT.
Dr. Zool Hilmi, a senior IEEE member, is presently serving as a deputy director at the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics located at the Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. He is a registered professional engineer under the Board of Engineers Malaysia and a member of various professional organizations including the Society for Underwater Technology, The Institution of Engineering and Technology, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Oceanic Engineering Society, and the Asian Control Association. Furthermore, he is also a registered chartered marine engineer of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and Technology. Dr. Zool Hilmi’s research is focused on Digital-Twin, Model-Predictive Control, Path-Planning, and Task Allocation based on Deep-Reinforcement Learning.
The first phase of the webinar focused on the introduction of digital twin ocean and omniverse platform. Some demonstrations are carried out to visualize the materials and water animation method without Action Graph in Omniverse Create. It is including Water Ocean Blue Reef and Water Opaque. The omniverse can provide a powerful tool for visualizing and communicating the data and insights generated by the digital twin ocean. By creating interactive and immersive simulations, researchers and students can better understand the complexity of ocean ecosystems and the impact of human activities on them. The digital twin ocean can offer high-fidelity data and models for simulating ocean ecosystems and their response to environmental changes. By combining the capabilities of the omniverse and digital twin ocean, new opportunities for innovation and discovery may emerge. For example, researchers could use the omniverse to simulate and test new technologies for ocean monitoring and management, using data from the digital twin ocean to validate their effectiveness.
The second phase covers on how generative AI can be utilized by developers and technical artists to develop custom tools for populating realistic environments with high-fidelity objects, while allowing end-users to create complex scenes quickly by simply inputting text-based prompts. The extension utilized in the experiment is based on Universal Scene Description (USD) SimReady assets, which are physically accurate 3D objects including robotic platform that can be employed in any simulation and mimic their real-world behaviour. Dr. Zool Hilmi also shows a simple demonstration on how the end-users can leverage the assisted tool to automatically generate and place objects, which reduces the time and effort required to create complex environments for robotic application. Meantime, Isaac Sim has been presented with the robust connector functionalities integrated within Omniverse, enabling the platform to offer native backing for frequently employed system design formats. Isaac Sim’s Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) importer has been subjected to rigorous testing on various robot models, and the software also allows CAD files to be seamlessly imported from both specific files, with only minimal post-processing required.
They were attended by approximately 25 engineering students at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia with a good level of interaction and several questions asked by the audience.
Japan Chapter
The 9th Underwater Technology Forum・ZERO HYBRID
The attendees and speakers have returned to the venue!
Reported by Harumi Sugimatsu
The 9th Underwater Technology Forum・ZERO was held from 13:00-17:00 on 21 April 2023, on the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo in Komaba Research Campus (https://seasat.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/UTforum/). This time, we had 116 in person attendees and more than 230 online attendees who tend to live far from Tokyo. Among the speakers, only one from UK by Blair Thornton was online. Advantage of hybrid style is efficiently utilized.
In addition, after three years from 2019, we were able to hold the reception after the forum, although participants were limited. The attendees and speakers have returned to the venue!
The topics of the forum are as below;
- Pressure Drop Voyage
- Origin of life -Seafloor Hydrothermal liquid/Supercritical CO2 Hypothesis
- A new sea surface platform -Application of UAV to Seafloor Geodetic Observation
- Measurement of blue carbon by an ASV
- Advanced Seafloor observation system for earthquakes using optical fiber sensing technology
- Mbps-class high-speed underwater acoustic communication technology for shallow waters ROV operation
- Introduction on kW-class position free wireless power supply for AUV, and underwater radio communication technology using Wavelet-OFDM
- An AUV lonely journey: mapping of multiple decommissioned petroleum sites over 1,000km in 22 days
The next Forum (hybrid) will be held on 14 October 2022, at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, in Kashiwa Campus. If you are interested to attend or give a talk, please contact us (https://seasat.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/UTforum/).
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.