Indian Institute of Technology Delhi ( IITD) OES Student Branch Chapter
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a lot of damage and has affected the lives of millions of people, especially the school students. The impact on academic and co-curricular activities, due to school closures, resulted in social isolation and has affected all students. Keeping in mind the holistic development of the children, we planned to organize an online competitive activity to explore and keep the creative side of children running during the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown period.

We are living in the era where environmental conditions are at an alarming state. Apart of natural resources, major cause of the increasing level pollution is anthropogenic contaminants and many others. To increase the awareness among the most important link of our society chain, the school student, and to engage students in productive activities, we have organized a virtual competition where they were to produce a video highlighting the air/water/sea pollution causes/remedy/conditions. We termed it as “SCHOOL Level Short Video Competition on Pollution and Efforts towards Promotion and Protection of Environment.” This competition aimed to recognize the creative efforts towards promotion and protection of the environment from various kinds of pollution, with special emphasis on Air Pollution and Marine Pollution.
The competition was organized for two categories: one was for 6th to 9th class students and the second was for students of class 10th to 12th. Entries were invited from all the national wide schools. For getting a wider audience, we published our event poster through our webpages, social media, as well as our dedicated committee for communicating emails with schools. More than 50 entries in each category were received in which students had made animated videos, as well as documentary videos, on the various kinds of pollution.
It was really difficult to shortlist the entries, but we selected a total of 15 students based on uniqueness, engagement, information, creativity and research base. On 4 July, 2021, the shortlisted students were invited in a virtual mode. The selected candidates presented their video to the chief guest, judges, and a wider audience. Judges evaluated the participants based on Communication & Presentation skills, problem definition, protective measures and how informative.

Ms. Zdenka Willis, President, Marine Technology Society, was the chief guest. She talked about the career opportunities in the marine sector, about MTS awards, scholarship funds for college graduates, undergraduates, and senior high school students who have been accepted into full-time marine-related programs. Dr R.Venkatesan, NIOT enlightened the students with benefits of membership as well as opportunities for students. Prof. Monika Agarwal talked about the advancement and development of the tools and procedures required to explore, study and further the responsible and sustainable use of the oceans. She facilitated a broader understanding of the relevance of marine technology to wider global issues by enhancing the dissemination of marine technology information. Dr. J. Preetha Roselyn envisaged students on the importance of communication skills and conceptual thoughts for their career development. Such skills are essential to become professional leaders in the areas of teaching, research and industrial practice. Almost 100 enthusiastically attended the event. Even Ms. Zdenka Willis, President, Marine Technology Society, who initially gave 15 mins for the event, stayed for the complete two hours actively.
To encourage the selected candidate, we finally conducted another event as a prize distribution ceremony on 25 July, 2021. All the judges and Principles of the school of the top ranked participants were invited. We played most popular videos on that day as Shweta A. Nair presented her video on less talked about pollution named Light Pollution.
Aarna Sareen gave a very informative presentation about air pollution.
Bhoomi Shukla made a presentation focused on the marine plastic pollution.
The top 3 winners from each category were awarded with the reward certificate. Best videos and winners’ posters were uploaded on our website (WHAT IS THE LINK?). First rank holder from the category 1 is selected to present her video on UN Decade Event endorsed by United Nation going to held on 14th September.


Our team put all the efforts into conducting this event, with many meetings and coordination handled by our team so that the event can go on smoothly.
Winner’s list

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Category 1
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| Rank | Name | Class | School |
| 1
2 3 |
Shweta A. Nair
Namya Madan Shlok Maheshwari |
VI
VII VIII |
The Mother’s International School, New Delhi
The Mother’s International School, New Delhi The Mother’s International School, New Delhi |
|
Category 2
|
|||
| Rank | Name | Class | School |
| 1
2 3 |
Aarna Sareen
Viraj Pattnaik Bhoomi Shukla |
X
X XII |
The Mother’s International School, New Delhi
Tagore International School, New Delhi Kendriya Vidyalya (A.G.C.R), New Delhi |


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.