Jay Pearlman (IEEE), Pauline Simpson (IODE), Johannes Karstensen (GEOMAR), Pier Luigi Buttigieg (AWI), Francoise Pearlman (FourBridges), Christoph Waldmann (MARUM), Cora Hoerstmann (AWI)
As many of us know, the oceans play a key role in global issues such as climate change, food security, and human health. However, there are challenges to a real understanding of the oceans including their vast dimensions and internal complexity, efficient monitoring and predicting of the planet’s oceans evolutionary dynamics. Thus, the effort of ocean observing and analyses must be a collaborative effort of both regional and global scale. The first and foremost requirement for such collaborative ocean observing is the need to follow well-defined and reproducible methods across activities: from strategies for structuring observing systems, sensor deployment and usage, and the generation of data and information products, to ethical and governance aspects when executing ocean observing. Thus, “ocean observing” are all activities of the value chain from preparing and conducting observations to impacts on society through applications of information. To meet the urgent planet-wide challenges we face, common methods across all aspects of ocean observing should be broadly adopted by the ocean community and, where appropriate, should evolve into. Best Practices and Standards. Thus , these Best Practices and Standards not only make the life of individual scientists easier but also contribute to a better usage of the collected information by other groups and organizations across the value chain.
Best practices bring many benefits such as quality and consistency of observations, interoperability of data, efficiency (don’t reinvent the wheel), and transparency. However, Best Practices are scattered and can be hard to find; they can be lost when a project ends, promising methods may not be shared, and work to create a Best Practice is often not acknowledged. To reduce this fragmentation, there is now an open access, permanent, digital repository of Best Practices documentation (oceanbestpractices.org) that is part of the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS). But the system is broader. In addition to the repository, the OBPS includes a peer reviewed journal research topic (https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/7173/best-practices-in-ocean-observing), a forum for community discussion and a training activity for creating and using Best Practices. Together, these components serve to realize a core objective of the OBPS, which is to enable the ocean community to create superior methods for every activity in ocean observing from research to operations to applications that are agreed upon and broadly adopted across communities.
The OBPS implementation is built on a vision of “a future where there are agreed and broadly adopted methods across ocean research, operations and applications” – and a mission “to provide coordinated and sustained global access to methods and Best Practices across ocean sciences to foster collaboration and innovation” (Pearlman et al. 2019). The importance of this was recognized by the UNESCO Intergovernmental Ocean Commission (IOC), which accepted the OBPS as an IOC project in July 2019. It is operated as a collaboration of the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) and the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS).
There are many debates on what methods should be included in the OBPS to further the vision and mission. People will say, “I do not know if my practice is best, so I will not participate.” Others say “we have integrated standard operating practices (SOP) to guide our work – these are our Best Practices but we don’t use the name Best Practices”. Thus, the OBPS accepts all forms of methods documentation such as SOPs, manuals, etc., in addition to Best Practices. Of course, methods are not static. Technology changes, applications move to new areas with different environments and skill bases. The OBPS provides a place where Best Practices can be collected and compared and where their evolution can be documented. To do this they must be readily discoverable and accessible. The OBPS has developed a semantic-based search user interface (Buttigieg, et al, 2019), which finds and then tags documents to help users sort through the more than 1000 ocean Best Practices in the OBPS Repository. These Best Practices are available at oceanbestpractices.org.
The support and use of Best Practices are a community-wide activity in which many facets of ocean observing participate. There is an annual workshop in which scientists and engineers,
both young professionals and experienced practitioners, come together to discuss community needs and OBPS capabilities. The latest workshop, the Ocean Best Practices Workshop III (OBP Workshop III), was held at the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) in Oostende, Belgium, 02-03 December 2019. It was organized with support from IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, IODE and GOOS with the objective of better understanding the future needs of the ocean observing community. The workshop outcomes were defined as: (1) an articulated strategic direction for ocean Best Practices; (2) recommendations for Best Practice synthesis; (3) the relation between standards and Best Practices; and (4) recommendations for further Ocean Best Practices System development/implementation, embedding outcomes from community input.
The 2019 Workshop III encouraged maximum audience participation and was structured with hour-long panels followed by discussion. This format was effective in stimulating ideas and discussions to lay out a future vision of ocean Best Practices and how OBPS will contribute to improving ocean observing in the decade to come. The panels addressed:
- Community inputs for Best Practices
- Key Advances in Ocean Observing and in related Technologies
- Synthesizing Best Practices
- Standards and Best Practices
- Capacity Building and Training
- Best Practices Vision for the Decade
Breakout Sessions were also a major part of the agenda, to provide opportunities for participants to share insights and, importantly, to make recommendations to the Panel on Vision for the Next Decade and ultimately the OBPS Steering Group. A detailed proceedings is available at Simpson, et al., 2020, which covers the discussion and recommendations. This paper will address some of the key recommendations.
Standards and Best Practices
An area that created a lot of discussion, led by Christoph Waldmann, was the relation and balance between standards and Best Practices. The two are closely related as Best Practices may evolve into standards while standards can leverage Best Practices descriptions for their detailed implementation. Both are developed through iterative processes that require community engagement and adoption. Culturally, the ocean research community generally works through Best Practices while the marine operations community uses many standards (for cables, ships, etc.).
This depends on the value/benefit to each of the communities. Recognizing this, the standards and Best Practices discussions noted that:
- Collecting these Best Practices in a central repository, the Ocean Best Practices System (OBPS), is of high value for the ocean observing communities and science community as a whole.
- Not all Best Practices have to be transferred to standards. It depends on the value/benefit for the community.
- Mission critical observations, for instance Tsunami forecasting systems, need standards.
- Metadata of data is very important for data users. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has developed the Observing System Capability Analysis and Review (OSCAR) tool which targets all users interested in the status and the planning of global observing systems as well as data users looking for instrument specifications at platform level.
Recommendations from the breakout included:
- Development of a more elaborate structure for the OBPS portal should be considered that makes the access to the required information more
- Pilot projects shall be initiated to assist this process where a certain number of different use cases shall be elaborated and act as template for other This will include capacity building aspects. Champions could be the cases of the carbon measuring community, ARGO, GO-SHIP, and HF RADAR. The promotion of communities like the glider community would benefit from this effort.
- It should be considered to connect OBPS Best Practices to GitHub and similar capabilities.
The importance of pilot projects to help understand the implementation of standards and Best Practices was noted in multiple discussions.
Capacity Development
The panel on capacity development recommended the creation of a “product” (e.g., peer-reviewed paper, a Best Practice, web page, training module), which would describe various types of capacity development activities (with their pros and cons) in relation to various types of Best Practices in OBPS and beyond. Such a product would not aim at providing a solution to every case, but would provide guidance on the most suitable capacity development modality according to the need, Essential Ocean Variable/platform that forms the subject of the capacity development, area of the ocean observing value chain being targeted, career stage and geographical location of target audience, as well as available budgets, etc.
While developing this product, the compilation of all the different capacity development modes highlighted should be complemented by modes previously not considered: hackathons, problem-based learning, student projects, collaborative research projects, infrastructure investments/donations, mentoring programs, training for policy makers (and school teachers), formal academic programs such as university degrees, and others to be determined. The most suitable mode depends on the participant’s current knowledge and available resources. The OBPS has initiated a survey on available capacity development programs as a follow up to this discussion at the workshop.
Panel on Best Practices Vision for the Decade
The panel was led by Anya Waite. Its purpose was to integrate the discussions of the workshop into a series of recommendations for the OBPS evolution.
Figure 4 Panelists for the Best Practices Vision for the Decade Panel
The characteristics of a decadal vision were broad and reflect the technical and social aspects of bringing together the community and working toward broad interoperability through the use of Best Practices, Standards and other means. The “strawman” characteristics were:
- Interoperability of data & knowledge & semantics
- Fully FAIR and known Data
- Excellent Data Management Plans
- 100% clear Provenance where data comes from and where it is being used
- Excellent Communication
- Trust in data, scientists and the general
- Value to Society
For interoperability, both data and knowledge interoperability (at all levels) needs to be part of the discussion. Additional facets of interoperability include legal interoperability, syntactic/semantic interoperability, etc. When we use the term interoperability does it mean for the ocean community or for the OBPS? It is both. We have an opportunity, to engage the different communities and challenge these communities about the availability of interoperable data within and across communities/disciplines to support outcomes reaching across the value chain. These use data interoperability as a “model” for a vision, but the characteristics are applicable to the Best Practices that cover the value chain from sensing to applications to societal impact. The panel identified that, to play an effective role in furthering this vision, there are certain key attributes of the OBPS:
- Portal/User Interface
- Synthesis and Standards and Accreditation
- Outreach and Communication
- Capacity Development and Retention
Participants in the workshop were asked to rank these through a real time poll. The results are shown in Figure 5.
The lighter distributed colors show the voting patterns for each of the four subjects. The participants identified the portal/interface as the highest priority with outreach/communications second. The message is that participants believe that the OBPS must continue its move from passive accumulation of BPs towards engagement and collaboration. Upgrades to the interface are already under way. Outreach and communication – including developing a communication plan – needs strengthening beyond the activities that have been done so far. It is interesting to reflect that the convergence among similar Best Practices and the creation of standards was the lowest in the ranking of the four. Standards have not been readily accepted by ocean observers due to the top down nature of standards creation. For the data and information practitioners, both de jure and de facto standards such as OGC WMS or NetCDF formats have found growing acceptance.
The final recommendations of the panel and the workshop focused on six areas of development, some long-term, but many for the next year or two. A detailed discussion of these is available in the workshop proceedings (Simpson, et al., 2020). The development areas were:
A Five-Page Description of Best Practices for Best Practices (BP4BP). This supports community development and submission to the OBPS. The paper was written following the workshop and is available in the OBPS repository (Hoerstmann, et al., 2020)
Position Paper to Journal Editors. Peer reviewed paper authors are more and more being required to publish the data underlying the research outcomes. The workshop recommended that the methods (Best Practices) used to collect and analyze the data should also be published as part of the peer-reviewed research. We recognize in making this recommendation that making BP citation a requirement might be too strong, as we don’t have full convergence on each BP. It is possible that some people won’t agree with the BPs that have been published and will instead cite their own practice in a paper.
Connect OBPS to other repositories. This can include GitHub for software and selected fora for community discussions. In response, the OBPS is implementing such a forum for community dialogues.
Outreach and Communications. A July 2019 Survey on ocean Best Practices showed that approximately 30% of the 450 respondents knew about the OBPS. Of those who knew about it, 80-90% would recommend its use. This is a clear indicator that more outreach is required.
Pilot Project on Synthesis. In the Breakout session on synthesis, there was a discussion on possible pilot case studies to address synthesis among Best Practices. Some of the areas suggested included: Microplastics; e-DNA; Acoustics (sound); Capture fisheries; Machine learning; and Harmonization of metadata. It is expected that the workshop in 2020 will address some of these options
Capacity Development Pilot Project – There are a lot of varied methodologies that are being used for capacity development. In terms of a repository of training methods/Best Practices, the panel acknowledged that it would take significant work. This area follows up the discussions at the OceanObs’19 Conference (http://www.oceanobs19.net), which made similar recommendations.
Workshop Participation
The importance of engineering participation in the creation of Best Practices cannot be understated. The workshop was fortunate to have a mix of science, engineering and operations expertise. Participants in the workshop are shown in Figure 6. It was this participation that made the workshop what it was.
Pilot
Figure 6 Workshop participants from many countries and disciplines contributed to the discussions and outcomes
Acknowledgements
The organizers. gratefully acknowledge the Ocean Best Practices System Steering Group for providing organizational, and/or logistical and in-kind support for Workshop III. We particularly acknowledge the co-sponsorship of IEEE, which enabled broader participation in the workshop, particularly of young professionals. In addition, co-sponsorship was provided by IODE and the NSF-sponsored OceanObs Research Coordination Network (NSF grant 1728913, Research Coordination Networks (RCN): Sustained Multidisciplinary Ocean Observations). Participants included members from the following IEEE OES Technology Committees: Current, Wave, Turbulence Measurement and Applications; Ocean Observation Systems and Environmental Sustainability; Ocean Remote Sensing; and Standards. Also, Roberto Petroccia YP Boost 2019-2020, attended the workshop.
Material for this article was extracted from the proceedings of the Evolving and Sustaining Ocean Best Practices Workshop III 2019 (Simpson, et al., 2020)
References
- Buttigieg, P. L., Simpson, P., Caltagirone, S. and Pearlman, J.S. (2019) The Ocean Best Practices System – Supporting a Transparent and Accessible Ocean. IEEE. OCEANS 2019 MTS/IEEE Seattle.
- Hörstmann, C.; Buttigieg, P.L.; Simpson, P.; Pearlman, J. and Waite, A.M. (2020) A Best Practice for Developing Best Practices in Ocean Observation (BP4BP): Supporting Methodological Evolution through Actionable Documentation. Paris, France, UNESCO, 26pp. (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission Manuals and Guides No. 84). (IOC/2020/MG/84). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25607/OBP-781
- Pearlman, J., Bushnell, M., Coppola, L. et al. (2019) Evolving and Sustaining Ocean Best Practices and Standards for the Next Decade. Frontiers in Marine Science, 6:277, 19pp. DOI:10.3389/fmars.2019.00277
- Simpson, P., Pearlman, F. and Pearlman J. (eds) (2020) Evolving and Sustaining Ocean Best Practices Workshop III, 02– 03 December 2019, UNESCO/IOC Project Office for IODE, Oostende, Belgium: Proceedings. Oostende, Belgium, IOC- IODE: GOOS and IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, 37pp. DOI: 10.25607/OBP-788
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.