Igor Kvasić, Vladimir Slošić, Luka Mandić, Juraj Obradović, Matko Batoš, Kristijan Krčmar, Matej Fabijanić
In the past six months, the IEEE OES University of Zagreb Student Branch Chapter (SBC) has organized and participated in a series of events aimed at deeper understanding and appreciation of marine robotics within our community, particularly among young individuals. These events, which included workshops, lectures, competitions and demonstrations, sought to bridge the gap between theory and practical application in the field of marine robotics.
Among the many milestones achieved during this period, one standout moment was our remarkable success in the prestigious MBZIRC robotics challenge. This achievement not only exemplified our chapter’s commitment to excellence, but also showcased the dedication and talent of our members in pushing the boundaries of innovation in robotics.
2023 was filled with interesting events from science fairs, expert visits and lectures,and culminating with Breaking the Surface 2023, our flagship event dedicated to advancing marine robotics and facilitating collaboration among experts and enthusiasts.
Breaking the Surface Workshop 2023
After 14 consecutive editions in Croatia, the international workshop of marine robotics and its applications, “Breaking the Surface” (BtS), was held for the first time outside Croatia, on the coast of Montenegro. The location shift proved to be a resounding success, marking a visit of over 200 experts and visitors from various marine disciplines congregated in the picturesque scenery of the Kotor bay in Montenegro. This interdisciplinary field workshop, focused on maritime robotics and applications, attracted professionals spanning maritime robotics, marine biology, maritime archaeology, maritime security, and marine geology from 23 countries worldwide. Over the course of seven days, participants were treated to an agenda featuring 15 plenary lectures, 8 tutorials, and 6 hands-on demos across 3 parallel program tracks.
Each morning, attendees could enjoy engaging plenary talks from expert speakers, intertwined by coffee breaks fostering new networking opportunities. The afternoons were filled with hands-on tutorials, always amusing practical demos and insightful company presentations from marine industry leaders. Since BtS is well known for its social events, evenings were reserved for an array of activities, including the chapter’s signature IEEE OES party, which kicked off the week, International Night, Pub Quiz, Karaoke Night and of course a closing ceremony to acknowledge the most deserving for yet another successful edition of BtS followed by the gala dinner. Saturday, usually reserved for the traditional field trip, saw participants embarking on a panoramic boat cruise around the beautiful Boka Bay, complemented with stops to the Lady of the Rocks island and historic city of Kotor.
Challenges and Competitions at BtS
As proud co-organizers of this official IEEE OES event, the IEEE OES UniZg Student Branch Chapter as usual facilitated the involvement of our student members and volunteers, enhancing the overall experience with diverse activities and opportunities for engagement. As the event introduced in the previous year’s, the Acoustic Localization Challenge, proved to be an interesting addition for participants, especially students, we decided to keep it in the programme. The competition requires participants to employ the best strategy in identifying the most accurate position estimate of a submerged acoustic pinger. This year, participants in the localization challenge were asked to locate a submerged miniature transponder using 2-way acoustic ranging. The groups were given an acoustic modem to interrogate the transponder, a GPS receiver, and access to a fast vessel to operate their localization methodology. The teams analyzed the collected range data on the boat and offline to estimate the position, and presented their methods and results on the final day of the workshop. The teams competed on three aspects: (1) a race to locate the transponder most quickly, (2) the most accurate final position after post-processing, and (3) the most innovative localization strategy. Experts accompanied the participating groups during their preparation, data collection, and analysis, and hydrophones were used to provide real-time visualization of the acoustic traffic in the water.
A new addition to this year’s edition was the 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, a challenge where participants learned how to extract the most important information from a complex topic such as their PhD’s and present it in the most interesting manner to a broad audience in under 3 minutes. The 3MT was an initiative aimed at improving students’ research presentation skills in an elevator pitch style. Each student had 3 minutes to present his/her thesis using a single presentation slide. The event included a tutorial on pitch making, where participants learned how to open their pitch, structure it, and deliver data effectively. The second workshop included hands-on experience in pitch making with expert feedback. Participants had the opportunity to refine their pitches with guidance from experts. On the last day of the workshop a distinguished referee team from academia and industry, as well as the audience, evaluated the three best pitches with great rewards.
The second addition was a hackathon focused on solving problems relevant to blue economy areas, in this case developing algorithms for detection and identification of phytoplankton in ocean samples.
From insightful lectures to hands-on demonstrations, student competitions and vibrant social gatherings, BtS 2023 exemplified the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and networking, setting the stage for future achievements in maritime robotics and beyond.
Special awards from IEEE Croatia Section and University of Zagreb Senate
On November 15, 2023, our former SBC president Anja Babić was awarded the IEEE Croatia Section Student Volunteer Award. The award was given out at the IEEE Croatia Section annual gala dinner and award ceremony held at Hotel International in Zagreb. Anja started volunteering within IEEE as a member back in 2014. Since then, she has been actively participating in international IEEE conferences by presenting papers, and in 2019 she participated in the judging jury of the OCEANS 2019 student poster competition. Seeing the lack of existence of a local community in the field of ocean sciences, in 2019 she played one of the key roles in founding and establishing our OES UniZg SBC. From its foundation until March 2023, Anja Babić served as the president of the branch. She distinguished herself by her contribution to the branch and the community through a series of valuable activities. The number of members of the branch grew from year to year, and 24 expert lectures and workshops were organized over the course of four years. In addition to numerous volunteer duties, work in classes and research projects, this year she successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “A hyper-heuristic approach to achieving long-term autonomy in a heterogeneous swarm of marine robots” under the mentorship of prof. Ph.D. Nikola Misković. Her student journey ends there, and thus her active involvement in the leadership of the student section, but her contribution remains invaluable.
On the occasion of the celebration of University Day in Zagreb, in the ceremonial hall of the Regional Center for the Development of Entrepreneurial Competences for Southeast European Countries – SEECEL, 08.11.2023. a solemn session of the Senate was held as part of the University Week. During the session, special awards were also given to students and professors who contributed to the University during the past academic year or during many years of work. A Special Student award was given to our member and webmaster Matej Fabijanić, a graduate student in Software Engineering and Information Systems, for his international success in scientific and professional work as part of Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technology in the scope of the HEKTOR project, and for having published papers at the international peer-reviewed conference OCEANS 2022 Hampton Roads and in Q1 MDPI JMSE 2023 Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.
Presentation of marine technologies at the University of Zagreb Fair 2023
OES UniZg SBC members Matej Fabijanić, Matko Batoš, Marko Barišić, Kristijan Krčmar, and Mak Gračić, together with associates, presented not only our research laboratory and equipment but also the whole Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) at this year’s edition of the University of Zagreb Fair from November 9th to 11th. They showcased their student demo about the remote control of the Blueye Pro ROV from the Fair to our lab pool that had an obstacle course to test the piloting skills of the interested Fair visitors.
Visitors had the opportunity to see and try out other selected student demos and talk with students attending FER to get useful information. Interest in FER was not only shown by high-school graduates, but there were various ages of children and adults who were interested in what FER offers. We hope that we have helped all interested visitors in the difficult decision that awaits them at the end of this school year, and next year we are waiting for you with new interesting demos.
OES UniZg members won the USV Obstacle Detection Challenge
We are proud to announce that two members of OES UniZg SBC won the USV Obstacle Detection Challenge track organized by the University of Tübingen and the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science. The challenge was to detect various objects on the surface of water and correctly classify them into various categories.
Matej Fabijanić and Magdalena Šimunec, the authors of the winning method, will be featured as co-authors in the challenge results paper. The results of the method will also be featured in the Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) workshop at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2024 held in Waikoloa, Hawaii.
Expert visits and invited lectures at the University of Zagreb
The IEEE OES University of Zagreb Student Branch Chapter, in collaboration with the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, organized many inspiring lectures at the University of Zagreb. Dr. Antonio Vasiljević came to give a talk on the topic “How research infrastructure projects can boost research and education activities and expand the project portfolio.” Dr. Antonio Vasilijević is a research project manager and the leader of the Applied Underwater Robotics Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is responsible for the Lab operation, full lifecycle of research projects, and building strong links with the industry.
In November Dr. Ivan Stenius, Associate Professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, arrived to give a lecture titled “From Subsea to Space: Integrated Research in Maritime and Space Robotics.” Dr. Stenius specializes in hydroelasticity and fluid-structure interactions for high-speed craft. Presently, Dr. Stenius’s expertise encompasses multidisciplinary development of innovative maritime solutions, merging hydrodynamics, electric propulsion, robotics, and the dynamics of underactuated systems to create agile underwater robots, and advanced hydrofoiling concepts. In recent years, he’s been instrumental in advancing research in underwater technology and maritime robotics at KTH and currently serves as the PI for the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre (SMaRC).
During November and December, the workshop “Tools for efficient academic research” was being held at the University of Zagreb by Professor Roee Diamant from University of Haifa. Participants, mostly Ph.D. students and researchers, could learn many good practices for efficient academic research, writing papers and many of the challenges that researchers face along the way. The workshop consisted of 5 lectures in which Professor Diamant presented his knowledge in the form of structured tools that he gathered through his impressive career as a researcher. As the Professor has reviewed and written hundreds of conference and journal papers, many students and external participants found it extremely useful and participated in the lectures.
Multiple school visits organized at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies
High school and university students from Sarajevo visited the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER) in September, 2023, as part of “school to science and academic community” initiative. As part of the visit, about twenty students, along with their supervisors, had the opportunity to visit two robotics laboratories – the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST), where they had the chance to see a pool for conducting projects in marine robotics and learn more about ongoing projects, and the Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Systems Control (LARICS), where they learned more about aerial robotics and robotic manipulators. The visitors also participated in a workshop on assembling and programming LEGO -Spike Essentials educational sets. All participants left FER with wonderful impressions.
Our team has won the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition
The team, composed of many of our chapter members and other students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, has won the first prize at the prestigious international robotics competition – MBZIRC (Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge). The challenge is held every two years in Abu Dhabi, and this edition started with a whitepaper phase in early 2022, followed by a simulation phase and culmination with a demonstration phase finale. This year’s competition aimed at creating a fully autonomous unmanned boat capable of retrieving objects from another vessel in collaboration with aerial drones.
“We are all very proud of this success! When we learned about this competition, and that it was the first experiment of its kind involving collaboration between unmanned aerial vehicles and unmanned surface vehicles for complex navigation and manipulation tasks in a maritime environment, we knew we had the right team to respond successfully to such a challenge. The preparation took almost two years, but it showed us what we are capable of, and such competitions and recognitions validate that everything we develop has practical applications. Considering that part of the team from the Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems (LARICS) managed the unmanned aerial vehicle, we have now proven – the sky is the limit!” emphasized the vice dean for research and innovation at FER, Prof. Dr. Stjepan Bogdan.
“In the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, we are engaged in applied research and the development of unmanned vehicles (underwater and surface) and innovations in marine technologies. What attracted us to this competition was the desire to demonstrate how much progress we have made in our research, and the purpose of this competition was to show how everything we have researched functions in a real environment. But we don’t stop there. We have big plans for Croatia related to research in the field of maritime robotics. Currently, we are competing for research funds to establish a Center of Excellence in the field of maritime robotics and technologies at FER – we have already received support from the Ministry of Science and Education, and we hope for support in the second phase, which, if successful, will firmly place Croatia on the world map of excellence in robotics,” highlighted Prof. Dr. Nikola Mišković, OES UniZG SBC advisor.
“We are proud of our team’s results, which are the outcome of many years of quality work on international projects. Our students and researchers face strong competition and work on challenging and current topics. These projects provide them with excellent working conditions and a quality life in Croatia. This result increases the visibility and impact of FER on the international level, confirming that we are doing great things for the world in Croatia,” said the dean of Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb, Prof. Dr. Vedran Bilas.
Many of our chapter members participated in this competition, starting from our advisors, Prof. Dr. Sc. Nikola Mišković, Doc. Dr. Sc. Đula Nađ, and Doc. Dr. Sc. Fausto Ferreira, who provided valuable mentorship during the competition. Our chapter members, Luka Mandić, Ivan Lončar, Natko Kraševac, Matko Batoš, Kristijan Krčmar, Martin Oreč, and Juraj Obradović, were actively involved in the development of algorithms for the Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), while Marijana Peti was part of the team in charge of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The USV played a crucial role in searching for the target vessel, autonomously navigating to it, and performing autonomous docking to the target vessel and retrieving cargo from the target ship.
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.