Harumi Sugimatsu and Robert Wernli Welcome to the December 2020 issue of the Beacon. I guess we could use as a theme the title of…
Incredible Women in Engineering Programs at Virtual OCEANS 2020
Brandy Armstrong – VP Professional Activities I hope you were able to catch the first global (combined Singapore and Gulf Coast), virtual, OCEANS. This was…
RoboSub Competition – OES Can Really Pick’em
Bob Wernli – Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief At the 2019 RoboSub competition, OES gave the society’s Innovation Award to Team Inspiration, which was the only high school…
Memorial University of Newfoundland Hosts International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Symposium
By: Jeff Green and Kathryn Lear (authors/editors) This Sep/Oct, Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland hosted the 2020 IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (IEEE OES) Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)…
VPTA Column (December 2020)
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities The season for renewing OES/IEEE membership is nearly finished (but you can still do it – there…
Distinguished Lecturer Roster
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities Each year OES appoints three Distinguished Lecturers for a four-year term. Each Distinguished Lecturer is endorsed by…
IEEE Journal of Engineering Early Access Papers (December 2020)
Mandar Chitre, Journal Editor-in Chief Congratulations to the authors of our most recently approved papers for the IEEE JOE. The following papers were published as…
Chapter News (2020)
Submit Chapter news to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator Malaysia Chapter COVID-19 CSR Program FKEE UTHM Reported by Abdul Kadir & Khalid Is On…
Sustaining Long-Term Ocean Observations
Christoph Waldmann, New Standards Standing Committee Chair, Senior Member IEEE OES Long-term observations are critical for using ocean resources responsibly and sustainably. Many nations are…
Enhancing the Ocean Best Practices System for Global Ocean Observation, Data Management and Applications
Jay Pearlman, Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Peter Pissierssens, Pauline Simpson Nearly 500 ocean experts and enthusiasts participated in September in a virtual workshop addressing ocean observations,…
A Blast from the Past! . . . OES Exhibits, Ready & Waiting!
Bob Wernli – Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief, photos by Stan Chamberlain OES Exhibits are always ready and waiting at all our conferences. Thanks to those who spend…
Member Highlights (December 2020)
Contact the editors if you have items of interest for the society Voyage with birds Harumi Sugimatsu, BEACON newsletter Editor-in-Chief We have a…
The New Age of Oceanography
Miriam E. Lucero-Tenorio, César A. Enderica-Posligua, Gema M. Camacho- Viteri, Karen M. Mirabá-Peñafiel An important objective of the IEEE technical chapters is to transmit to…
Professional Activities, Gone Virtual
Brandy Armstrong, VP of Professional Activities Remember all those grand plans we had back in the spring? A lot has changed since then… with the…
Chapter News – September 2020
Submit Chapter news to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator Providence Chapter Reported by Cathy Ann Clark & David Leslie On March 5, 2020, the…
Open Ocean Robotics ASV Winch: University of Victoria Student Capstone Project
Ryan Foxall, University of Victoria Open Ocean Robotics is a Victoria based start-up that designs, builds, and operates autonomous surface vessels (ASV) for scientific data…
A Blast from the Past! . . . We Love Our Music!
Bob Wernli – Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief, photos by Stan Chamberlain Another look back at our OCEANS conferences, where, no matter what country we’re in, we love…
Member Highlights – September 2020
We introduce what OES members did to survive the stay-at-home period of the pandemic. Please enjoy! The following newspaper article, by Josh Bickford of the…
Welcome to COA 2021!
2021 IEEE/OES China Ocean Acoustics Conference – COA 2021, Harbin, China 27-30 May 2021 *The conference has been shifted from 2020 to 2021 due to…
Research and Education Activities under the Coronavirus Pandemic
Takumi Matsuda, Meiji University, IEEE OES Japan Chapter, BEACON Associate Editor Introduction I have been studying the navigation methods of the multiple autonomous underwater vehicles…
Who’s who in the OES – September 2020
Farheen Fauziaya, OES WIE Liaison and a newly elected AdCom member (from 2021 to 2023) The literal meaning of my name is “a wise lady…
Oceanic Engineering Society IIT Delhi, India
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) – OES STUDENT CHAPTER The Centre for Applied Research in Electronics (CARE) established in 1971 has been engaged in…
COVID-19, Keel Bolts, Engine Mounts & 474 Blows
For all of us dealing with the effects of the corona virus, not all aspects of the social lock-downs are bad, as explained in Sandy’s…
Student Poster Competition going Virtual
Shyam Madhusudhana, OES Student Poster Competition Chair A flagship event at every MTS/IEEE OCEANS conference is the Student Poster Competition (SPC) in which student researchers…
An opportunity to inspire young minds towards Oceanic Engineering – TryEngineering webinar
Hari Vishnu, Earthzine Editor-in-Chief, Research Fellow, Acoustic Research Laboratory Singapore Grace Chia, CEO of BeeX Wikipedia defines Engineering as the use of scientific principles to…


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.