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UKRI Chapter
UKRI Chapter Holds Successful Joint Subsea Innovation Technologies Workshop With Young Professionals Chapter in Aberdeen, UK
Reported by Brian Horsburgh, Secretary of UKRI Chapter
The two chapters joined forces to organise this in person workshop on 7 June in Aberdeen. Hosted at the Robert Gordon University Campus, the event was jointly chaired by Dr. Nazila Fough, Chair of the UKRI Young Professionals Chapter and Professor Prabhu Radhakrishna, Chair of the UKRI Oceanic Engineering Society Chapter.
Topics included presentations on “Ultracompact Underwater Digital Holographic Camera for 3D Imaging of Marine Microorganisms” by Dr. Thangavel Thevar of University of Aberdeen; “Safety and Security of Maritime Infrastructure” by Dr. Andrei Petrovski of National Subsea Centre, “Subsea: Freedom to Inspect’’ by Ms. Ka Henney of Oceaneering and “Corrosion Monitoring of Pipelines and Effectiveness of Ultrasonic Guided Wave Inspection” by Dr. Anil Prathuru of Robert Gordon University, among others.
20 posters by PhD students and Young Professionals were displayed during the day in the poster session.
Several members of the OES Chapter Executive Committee were involved in the organisation and presentations at the event.
OES UKRI chapter Chair, Prof. Prabhu, hailed the event a success, working jointly with Dr. Fough of Young Professionals to organise the event. “This is the largest in person workshop we have organised this year, in addition to several online and hybrid presentations. We hope to add more later this year, to make 2024 the strongest year yet for OES Chapter events.”
Japan Chapter
The 12th Underwater Technology Forum・ZERO
HYBRID
Reported by Harumi Sugimatsu
The 12th Underwater Technology Forum・ZERO was held from 13:00-17:00 on 11 October 2024, on the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo in Kashiwa Campus (https://www.aori.u-tokyo.ac.jp/english/access/index.html). This time, we had 66 in-person attendees and 142 online attendees.
The highlight of the forum was a live reporting from the Deep Earth Exploration Vessel “Chikyu” on its 405th research drilling cruise (JTRACK: https://www.jamstec.go.jp/chikyu/e/exp405/). For the audience, the researchers aboard the vessel were given a virtual tour of the core laboratory and other facilities where drilled core samples are analyzed. In the venue, Asuka Yamaguchi (Forum co-organizer) explained the significance and purpose of the drilling survey and core sampling. It was a time when the audience and the researchers on board became one.
The following lectures (Science in the first half, Engineering in the second half) were then given.
- Recent changes in tropical Pacific SST (sea surface temperature) patterns are a mystery
- What happened in the sea during the Noto Peninsula Earthquake? Results of shallow-sea bottom survey along the Coast of Suzu-shi and Noto-cho
- Advances in Marine Microplastics Research
- Introduction of HUGIN Endurance for two-week continuous operation
- Realization of a Fishing Robot Boat by a University Startup
- Development of monitoring systems for sustainable ocean use
- Where the Seabed 2030 Program is now? Working in Monaco, Living in South France – Online talk from Monaco
From the talk “What happened in the sea during the Noto Peninsula Earthquake? Results of shallow-sea bottom survey along the Coast of Suzu-shi and Noto-cho”
In the last talk, it is presented that Seabed 2030, which aims to acquire 100% of the world seafloor bathymetry by 2030, had acquired about 6% at the start of 2017 and 26.1% as of 2024. This is a fourfold increase from the beginning, but 70% still remains unknown. This shows the difficulty of acquiring data on the seafloor.
The next 13th Forum will be held on the 11th of April, 2025, at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo. See you there!
Australian Council Chapter
Building Momentum and OES Special Session at IGARSS 2025
Reported by Melanie Olsen, Chapter Chair
The Australian Council OES Chapter continues to build momentum through facilitating technical talks across Australia for our members. We welcomed a technical seminar by Craig Steinberg on mass coral bleaching weather and oceanography and engaged with national marine science agencies AIMS and CSIRO to share joint monthly technical seminars.
In September, we organised our first OES Distinguished Lecturer series virtual technical seminar, which was well attended and a resounding success. Dr. Kenneth G. Foote from WHOI spoke to ocean technologists across Australia and New Zealand regarding making defensible active-sonar measurements of pelagic fish abundance. We are grateful for the OES Distinguished Lecturer program for this opportunity.
Our OES Chapter will be hosting a special session on the Challenges for Ocean Remote Sensing in the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development at IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2025), which will be held in Brisbane Australia on the 3-8th of August 2025. This is a great opportunity to share your research and build connections with Australian OES members and the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. The paper submission portal is now open. https://2025.ieeeigarss.org/Papers/Submission.asp?SessionType=CCS&ID=2029
To lodge papers at our session, select our topic from the dropdown menu at the “Primary Session Topic – Subtopic prompt.” It would be great to facilitate sharing your research with like minded peers in Brisbane next year.
Victoria Chapter
OES Victoria Chapter tours Open Ocean Robotics facility
Reported by Nick Hall-Patch, Secretary – Treasurer
In the September 2020 OES Beacon (https://beacon.ieeeoes.org/oes-beacon/september-2020-oes-beacon/open-ocean-robotics-asv-winch-university-of-victoria-student-capstone-project/), Ryan Foxall wrote about a University of Victoria student capstone project sponsored by The OES Victoria Chapter. That project involved the design of an automated winch that the students had developed for a local engineering firm, Open Ocean Robotics, to be mounted to one of their robotic surface vehicles. Four years later, Chapter members and guests were able to tour that company’s facility with Dr. Fritz Stahr, its Chief Technical Officer, as our host.
The tour started at Open Ocean Robotics’ entrance, where we obtained some historical background about the company, and its specialty: uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs). Julie Angus, the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean from mainland to mainland, is the co-founder of the company and its CEO; the idea for building uncrewed surface vessels (USV) for ocean monitoring was developed after observing extreme storm conditions during that rowing expedition. Also at this point, we were able to view earlier versions of USVs that the company had developed as well as Open Ocean Robotics’ present USV, the DataXplorerÔ.
The USVs are about four meters long, and are light enough to be deployed on a wheeled cart by one or two people. They generate little sound while in operation, using electrical propulsion, powered by lithium-ion batteries that can be recharged with solar panels mounted on the deck. The autonomous recharging capability means that deployment for months at a time is possible. The USV’s are fitted with cameras looking all around, as well as various sensors, both above and below the waterline, for basic environmental data.
A unique feature of their design is the minimal keel beyond the protective housing for the propellor, which means that they can be used in very shallow water. Self-righting in turbulent seas is provided instead by a buoyant roll bar mounted above the stern of the vessel, as seen in the accompanying Figure.
A video clarified further some of the DataXplorer details, not to mention showing us spectacular examples of the self-righting capability in the surf zone off western Vancouver Island. (This can also be seen in a video clip on the company website https://www.openoceanrobotics.com/surface-vehicles). An important component of the USV is its software, XplorerView™ Mission Control, and we were shown examples of the software in action. Although the DataXplorer can be run unattended, users can also control the USV at all times, using video and other data streamed back from the device. We were told that a trained single user could control three, and perhaps more, USV’s at once using the software.
A very recent example of a USV deployment in Shinnecock Bay with Stony Brook University was also described in the video, outlining the advantages of USV deployment for water sampling for eDNA compared with more traditional methods. These included being able to sample in shallow sites, to sample at night, and perform more frequent sampling at well defined sites than a crewed surface vessel could do.
The tour concluded in the company assembly area where we were able to look over the facilities, examine the inner workings of USV’s being assembled, and were able to discuss sensor possibilities and placement.
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.