Authored by Steve Holt and photos by Stan Chamberlain with input from many of Glen’s friends.
A distinguished and longtime member of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, Dr. Glen Nordyke Williams, age 77, died April 3, 2016 at the College Station Medical Center, Texas, after a courageous, eight- year fight with cancer.
Glen was born on November 15, 1938 in Port Arthur, Texas. As a boy, he enjoyed spending time on the family rice farm near Crowley, Louisiana, and often recalled shoot-
ing water moccasins from the bridges over the bayous. As a teenager, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout, and spent summers unloading oil drums and sacks of sugar from barges on the Intracoastal Canal, where he learned the meaning of hard work, and gained a lasting respect for the men around him who made it their living. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur as a member of the class of 1956.
Glen entered Texas A&M University as a member of the Corps of Cadets, serving as the Executive Officer 3rd Group Staff during his senior year. During one Christmas break, he met his wife-to-be, Mary Drago, also from Port Arthur, at the public library. They were married in Port Arthur on April 24, 1960, and he graduated with a BS degree in Civil Engineering the same year. Within a short time, he earned an MS and PhD in the same field, entered the Air Force, and served three years at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His military ser- vice to his country was always a source of pride for him and his family. During this time, the Williams family grew from two to seven, inspiring him to become a master tickler, model airplane builder, and giver of piggy-back rides, despite there being nothing to grab because of his perpetual flattop haircut.
The majority of Glen’s career started when he moved his family back to Texas, and was hired as a professor at Texas A&M University. His time there spanned 41 years, and was spent doing research in a wide variety of areas, including the growth of pine forests, optimal flow through fluid networks,
motion of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, computer visualization, autonomous underwater vehicles, and computer modeling of a Slinky in motion. He often said his favorite part of the job was the students, and with more than 4300, he influenced and inspired many, serving on 69 MS committees and 46 PhD committees. Many of those relationships have lasted to the present day. He was one of the original founders of the Computer Science program at Texas A&M, and received many honors over the years, including The Association of Former Students Distinguished Teaching Award, and the election to Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. As Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering, he was instrumental in establishing Texas A&M University at Qatar. He was proud to be registered in the State of Texas as a Professional Engineer.
Glen’s family knew him as a loving father and grandfather who exemplified integrity, honesty, kindness, faith, strength, and courage. He never tired of fast-pitch softball, handball, fishing, grilled cheeseburgers, Aggie football games, and Friday night fun at the movies. His 21 grandchildren will always remember their times with “Poppop” or “Gupapa” at the beach cabin, and getting to go out on the boat to catch flounder and redfish with him. Sharing those times with his family and friends was more important to him than whether the fish were biting. Glen and Mary were happily married for 56 years. As he would phrase it, “’nuff said.”
Glen is survived by his wife Mary and their children, Janna and Glen Williams, Jim Williams, Dana and Edward Rhomberg, Kathy and Michael Roth, Karen and Joseph Ogden, and his grandchildren: Megan, Glen III, Colton, Jackson, Lauren, Zachary, Joshua, Mary Elizabeth, Kathryn, Caroline, Christopher, Alaina, Jonathan, Nicholas, Hannah, Tyler, Matthew, Kathy, Concetta, Sam, and Mark.
Glen served as the President of the IEEE OES for two terms, first from 1990–1993 and later from 1999–2000. He was awarded the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, elevated to the IEEE Fellow Member Grade in 1995, received the OES Distinguished Service Award in 1996, and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000. He also received the newly created “OES Emeritus Award” in 2014, along with the late Col. Norman Miller and Stan Chamberlain.
In 1991, as Desert Storm was brewing in the Middle East, travel for potential attendees was limited and cancellation was being considered for OCEANS 91. Glen took a strong stand and provided unwavering leadership to keep OCEANS 91 on track for Honolulu, and it exceeded expectations.
Glen was instrumental in bringing the OCEANS Conferences out of Northern America and especially to France, which
was encouraged by Rene Garello, and he also provided strong leadership for Brest in OCEANS 94 and Nice in OCEANS 98. Our President Garello recently stated that he was in this sense his mentor inside the OES. Together they visited the Hamburg facilities right after the OCEANS conference in Nice in 1998 for a possible OCEANS there. In Nice, Joe Vadus was the nominee for OES President but Glenn said he had more tasks yet to complete as a President, and so he asked Joe if he could continue for another term, which was granted.
Glen was also a strong supporter for the newly formed Reconnaissance Committee and participated in early activities, including recon visits to Bergen and Oslo, Norway and Hamburg, Germany with Recon Chair Bob Wernli. Also, at Bob’s request, Glen completed compiling the history of all the OES EXCOM members which is also now on the website.
In his second term, the OES explored various options for delivering the newsletter to its members. Finally, with such faithful advocates as Joe Vadus, in early 2000, Glen announced “for the foreseeable future, the OES will continue to publish the Newsletter in both hard copy form as well as the web-based electronic versions, with the hard copy version delivered to all the members”.
Another major initiative he spearheaded was to make the Society’s publications more easily available, so the OES released
its OES Digital Archive on CD-ROMs. The digital archive included OES-sponsored conference proceedings from 1970 to 2000 and the IEEE JOE from 1974 to 2000 for a total of 9600 papers on six CD-ROMs with a search engine by AstaWare providing full-text search. Before the next generation of the OES Digital Archive was planned, the IEEE Xplore Web-accessible database of current and past issues of IEEE periodicals, including those of the OES, came online and eliminated the need for an updated OES archive.
In 2008, Glen teamed up with OES colleagues Stanley G. Chamberlain, Joseph Czika, Jr., and the late Norman D. Miller to research and publish a capstone historical document “The IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society at Forty: The Challenges of an Evolving Society”. It was published in the IEEE JOURNAL OF OCEANIC ENGINEERING, VOL. 33, No. 1, JANUARY 2008.
In the words of Sally Chamberlain, the wife of our Past President Stan Chamberlain, “Glen was a giant of a man, with an equally big heart that had room for absolutely everyone. No one made me feel more welcome at an OCEANS Conference than Glen and his wife Mary”.
Glen truly had a remarkable career and legacy that he left behind with his family, friends, colleagues and the OES and he will always be sorely missed by all.
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.