Brandy Armstrong, Executive VP, executive-vp@beacon.ieeeoes.org
The Executive Vice President (Executive VP) of IEEE OES is responsible for Governance, Strategic Planning and coordinating with other Societies and Organizations. IEEE OES has been meeting with the organizations that sponsor the Ocean Sciences Meeting to determine ways in which our organizations can work together to leverage resources and further our shared goals.

Ocean Sciences Meeting
The IEEE OES has signed an MOU to technically co-sponsor the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024 (OSM24). Activities between IEEE, Incorporated on behalf of OES and American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Society on Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), and The Oceanographic Society (TOS) are envisioned to foster dissemination and exchange of scientific research and promote scientific opportunities for all organizations. This technical co-sponsorship entails IEEE OES sponsoring technical sessions at the conference and participation by one of our volunteers in the technical program committee. There will also be an opportunity for IEEE OES to share an electronic ad or short presentation on its presence at OSM24.
Ocean Sciences Meeting and OCEANS Conferences
Ocean Sciences Meeting (OSM) is a bi-annual, academically heavy conference, which creates an excellent opportunity for technical and engineering content to reach an academic audience. OSM is also a conference where only abstracts are published and oral and poster presentations are made. Since there are not published papers at OSM, we encourage our session chairs to invite their presenters to present and publish at a future OCEANS Conference.
IEEE OES Sponsored Sessions
Abstract submissions are now open for Ocean Sciences Meeting 2024, which will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, on 18-23 February of 2024. To ensure that our sessions are successful we need ample abstract submissions for each of our sponsored sessions. Abstract submissions for OSM24 close September 13, 2023, at 23:59 EDT/03:59+1 UTC. Please consider submitting an abstract to the IEEE OES sponsored technical sessions listed below:
Session Title: HE003: Autonomous Sensing and Monitoring in Polar Environments
Topic Area: High Latitude Environments
Session Title: OT006: Breaking Barriers: Bridging the Gap in Methodologies and Data Reporting for Ocean Biogeochemistry
Topic Area: Ocean Technologies and Observatories
Session Title: OT020: Sustained Ocean Observation Systems for Small Island Developing States (SIDS)
Topic Area: Ocean Technologies and Observatories:
Session Title: OT007: Combining Underwater Imaging with Deep Learning for Better Ocean Observations
Topic Area: Ocean Technologies and Observatories
Session Title: DO015: Pairing Autonomous Monitoring and Ocean Modelling: Advancing Our Understanding of Coastal Ocean Systems Through Capacity Expansion
Topic Area: Digital Ocean
Session Title: DO013: Online Session – What Should the Machine Learn if The Data is Not “Big”? Interpreting “Size-Limited” Oceanic Data Collected Autonomously or Manually Using Data Science and Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Topic Area: Digital Ocean
Session Title: DO012: Online Session – Cognitive Sonar and Other AI-driven Sonar Sensing of the Marine Environment
Topic Area: Digital Ocean
Session Title: CP013: Strategies for Combining Innovative Monitoring and Modeling Systems in Coastal Environments
Topic Area: Coastal and Estuarine Hydrodynamics and Sediment Processes
IEEE OES Sponsored Town Halls
OSM is also seeking abstract submissions for Town Halls, which will be proposed by the community and open to all meeting participants. The Ocean Decade Initiative plans to submit an abstract for a Town Hall at OSM. This one-hour session will be used to:
- Collect feedback & raise awareness.
- Deliver updates and gather input from the broader OSM community.
- Could be in presentation, roundtable, or panel discussion format.
Approved town halls will be open to all meeting attendees, scheduled during lunchtime on Monday through Friday, and focused on topics that do not compete with, substitute, or duplicate scientific or learning sessions.
If you would like to contribute to the Ocean Decade Initiative and participate in helping organize future town halls and events focused on the Ocean Decade, please email Laura Meyer at laura.meyer@ieee.org . If you have ideas for collaboration with other IEEE organizational units or outside organizations, please contact the Executive Vice President at executive-vp@beacon.ieeeoes.org


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.