Mark Dwortzan, Reprinted from Boston University website
Professor William Carey (me), 69, a leading researcher in the field of underwater acoustics, died Wednesday, July 11 at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut after a long illness.
A professor in the mechanical engineering department since 1999, Carey’s research centered on the design and performance of underwater acoustic antennae known as arrays, which have been widely used in tracking enemy submarines and exploring the marine environment.
Carey’s recent work on arrays focused on the development and demonstration of towed hydrophone arrays used to detect sound in shallow water coastal areas and ports. overall, his array technology research contributed significantly to array design and calibration, at-sea array measurements and the understanding of how ocean and seabed environmental properties determine array performance.
Also a leading expert on ocean ambient noise, Carey conducted extensive studies of noise from breaking waves and the signal-to-noise ratio that towed and other arrays sense in the real ocean environment. in recent years he measured the ambient noise produced by micro-bubbles and bubble clouds resulting from sea surface activity, and helped determine that these clouds can optimally radiate and scatter low frequency sound.
In 2007 the acoustical Society of America awarded Carey the Pioneer of Underwater acoustics Silver medal for his contributions to understanding ocean ambient noise and defining the limits of acoustic array performance in the ocean. at the time, only 16 other individuals had earned this distinction since the medal was introduced in 1959.
“Those who have the privilege of working more closely with bill soon realize that there is a wealth of wisdom and experience in his flood of words, and a lot of scientific and engineering originality as well,” James Lynch, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, said in introductory remarks for Carey’s award ceremony. “That Bill’s passion, experience, knowledge, and insight first gets expressed verbally is a stylistic thing—what is more important is that Bill’s words are usually the prelude to some vigorous action, be it experimental, theoretical, pedagogical, advisory or editorial. even at this senior stage of his career, Bill still actively goes to sea, works hands on with electronic and mechanical equipment, develops new mathematical theory and ‘shows the students how it’s done.’”
In reaction to the news of Carey’s passing, Boston University mechanical engineering department Chair and Professor Ronald A. Roy, who worked closely with him for over two decades, said, “a dedicated educator and consummate leader, Bill was a completely unique individual who possessed a broad spectrum of knowledge which he readily applied to a host of important scientific and national security problems related to oceanic engineering and underwater acoustics. He touched many lives over the course of a distinguished career and will be singularly missed by students, friends and colleagues.”
Carey was a member of the Cosmos Club and Sigma Xi; a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; recipient of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society’s distinguished Technical achievement, Third millennium and distinguished Service awards; and editor emeritus of the Journal of Oceanic Engineering and an associate editor of the Journal of the acoustical Society. Carey was also an adjunct professor of applied mathematics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic institute and an adjunct scientist in applied ocean physics and engineering at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
He was born in Boston in 1943 but spent most of his youth in Germany. He attended Catholic University of America, where he received a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1965, a master’s degree in physics in 1968 and a doctorate in 1974. after his doctoral work, he worked at the Argonne national laboratory from 1974 to 1979. over the next three decades, he worked for a number of different laboratories and agencies, including the naval research laboratory, naval Underwater Systems Center and the defense advanced research Projects agency, doing both ocean acoustics research and managerial work. He joined the BU faculty after a two-year stint at MIT’s department of ocean engineering.
Editor’s Note: Bill served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering (2011–2012), having served previously in that capacity (1992–1998). Bill also served as an elected member to the Administrative Committee for OES.


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.