1SAUCE-E Technical Director, NATO-STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE),
2Member of the Technical Committee, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SPAWAR),
The Student Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) Challenge – Europe (SAUC-E) is celebrating 10 years of student innovation and inspiration. Since its first edition in 2006, year after year SAUC-E has increased its importance in the marine robotics community. Now in its 11th edition, it has become a stable, well-known competition that attracts the best student teams in Europe and promotes the goal of educating the next generation of marine engineers. Its successes may be measured by several outcomes, including that SAUC-E was at the foundation of the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge, the world’s first multi-domain field robotics competition combining aerial, land and marine robotics. After last year’s success of euRathlon 2015, in which SAUC-E 2015 was integrated, it was not an easy task to maintain the standard at such a high level, but this year’s edition has kept growing with several new developments, as we will see.
The Competition
The competition was organised (for the 7th time in a row) by the NATO-STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) and was held 3–8 July 2016, back in La Spezia CMRE water basin, after the euRathlon-linked edition was held in Piombino (Italy) last year.
Each year, SAUC-E challenges multidisciplinary University teams (consisting at least of 75% student members) to design and build AUVs capable of performing realistic missions. The students’ AUVs must perform a series of tasks autonomously, facing real-life challenges such as limited visibility in the sea, with no control, guidance or communication from a person or from any off-board computer including GPS systems. Tasks set in previous years have included underwater structure inspection, detection of a mid-water target, passing though validation gates and following a wall. This year, we added a new mission task; the search for a missing person underwater, represented by a realistic mannequin.
At SAUC-E, teams are fostered to test multi-vehicle collaboration to improve precise sonar based navigation, data processing and mission reporting in real time. Collaboration may be between two AUVs from the same team, one AUV and one Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) belonging to the same team or even two AUVs from two different teams.
AUV Team Tom Kyle prepares to start their trial.
As in the previous SAUC-E editions, the challenges were held at the CMRE waterfront sea basin, which is a sheltered harbor that offers participants the opportunity to handle real-life sea conditions, including limited visibility and salty water, but within a safe, controlled environment. The limited visibility added severe difficulties to object recognition by AUVs, even if the target was bright orange in colour.
Nonetheless, several teams were able to tackle the tasks, mostly achieving their goals. Out of the 8 teams registered, all tested their vehicles in the water and 5 classified into the Finals on the last competition day by fulfilling the “passing the gate” task during the first four competition days. This task, showing basic vehicle navigation capabilities, requested the AUV to navigate from a starting point through a gate composed of two buoys.
Two teams managed to show collaboration between an AUV and ASV. One of the interesting things we have noticed is the evolution of the teams over the different SAUC-E editions. We have seen significant and steady progress from year to year in teams that are recently new to this kind of competition, such as AUV Team Tom Kyle or the AUGA team.
The Participant Teams
Of the 8 teams, 7 had previously participated in SAUC-E, showing how SAUC-E is today a fixed appointment for several European research groups. Moreover, two of the teams had been away from SAUC-E for 3 years and came back this year which highlights that SAUC-E can be a strong stimulus for research groups to continue working on underwater vehicle technology. The success of euRathlon 2015 has also played a role in this regard. For example, 5 teams that participated last year also took part in the competition this year.
As we did last year, CMRE was able to loan, without charge, one AUV robotic kit to be given to a team. As in euRathlon 2015, the robotic kit was the basic version of a SPARUS II AUV without payload sensors. This initiative aims to expand the number of teams by providing a selected team a sort of “jump start”, since building an underwater robot is not a trivial task, and to promote rapid development and innovation. This year the chosen team was AUGA, a recipient of the loan also in 2015. Although this year the team had little time to practice with the robot (the AUV was sent in late April 2016), the performance was satisfactory and the team reached 4th place. The SPARUS II is another success story of SAUC-E. The platform was designed and realised based on the experience matured in previous SAUC-E editions and is now commercialised by a University of Girona spin-off. This is the kind of technology transfer that we would like to encourage as an output of robotics competitions.
The participant teams were:
- AUGA (Spain); from the University of Vigo and ACSM (Advanced Crew and Ship Management), a company that participated in the sea trials with a loaned SPARUS II AUV. Past participant of SAUC-E (2015)
- AUV Team Tom Kyle (Germany); from the University of Applied Sciences of Kiel. (3rd place in SAUC-E 2015).
- ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 (France); one of the 2 teams from the Institute of ENSTA. Regular participant and awarded team of SAUC-E (2nd place in 2015).
- ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 (France); the 2nd of the two teams from the Institute of ENSTA. Regular participant of SAUC-E.
- ROBOTUIC Team (Spain); from the International University of Canarias. This was their first participation in SAUC-E, showing that the competition keeps attracting new teams.
- UNIFI Team (Italy); from the University of Florence. Past participant of SAUC-E (2012, 2013, 2015).
- UnivPM Team (Italy); from University-Polytechnic of Marche. This team participated in SAUC-E 2013 and came back after 3 years, which shows that the SAUC-E brand is well known and reputed.
- UWE Team (UK); from the University of West of England, Bristol. This is another team that, after 3 years, came back to participate in the competition.
The winning team (ENSTA Bretagne Team 1) with CMRE’s Director and Dr. Nikola Miskovic.
The Winners
The winners of the 11th edition SAUC-E competition were:
- 1st Place – ENSTA Bretagne Team 1 (France).
- 2nd Place – AUV Team TomKyle, from the University of Applied Sciences of Kiel (Germany).
- 3rd Place – UNIFI Team with the robot Marta from the University of Florence (Italy).
Other prizes awarded were: - “Collaborator Award” – AUGA Team, from the University of Vigo with ACSM (Spain)
- “Rookie of the Year Award” – ROBOTUIC Team, from International University of Canarias (Spain)
- “Tenacity Award” – ENSTA Bretagne Team 2 (France)
- “Innovation Award” – UnivPM Team, from University-Polytechnic of Marche (Italy)
- “Persistence Award” – UWE Team, from the University of the West of England (UK)
- “Data Visualization Award” – UNIFI Team, from the University of Florence (Italy).
The Judges
We are pleased to thank the Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG), SPAWAR and IEEE OES, who provided exceptionally qualified judges, increasing the quality of the competition. Other institutions represented in the judging team were the University of Zagreb, the National Research Council of Italy and Imperial College London.
The Judging Team with CMRE’s Director RADM Ort and CMRE Staff.
The SAUC-E participants and Robocademy students together with staff and judges.
Sponsors and Exhibitors
IEEE OES played a fundamental role as one of the Main Sponsors, without whose support it would not have been possible to hold the competition. The other Main Sponsor was ONRG, a long-time supporter whose sponsorship has been essential for the successful organisation of the event over many years. One of the SAUC-E goals is to educate future ocean engineers. Therefore, the sponsorship of ‘Breaking the Surface’ 2016, the 8th Interdisciplinary Field Workshop of Marine Robotics and Applications, is well aligned with our mission. The organisers of ‘Breaking the Surface’ provided 3 complimentary registrations to the winning team, 2 to the second team and 1 to the third team, allowing 6 students to participate in this interesting and educational workshop.
We also have engagement from the marine robotics commercial sector, with Subsea Mechatronics offering a paid internship of up to 6 months to one student from the winning teams and as they did last year, VideoRay LLC also joined the sponsors club, donating 4 x M5 thrusters to the best two teams. Optoforce was another supporter, offering 50% discount on some of their products for the participating teams.
A new development for SAUC-E 2016 was the presence of exhibitors. For the first time, CMRE opened its doors to companies and institutions that wished to participate with an exhibition space. This attracted the CADDY FP7 project, the EXCELLABUST H2020 project, the Interuniversity Center of Integrated Systems for the Marine Environment (ISME) and SBG Systems to set up stands and connect with the SAUC-E community.
SAUC-E 2016: More than a Competition –An European Marine Robotics Forum
This year’s SAUC-E had several extras that made it more than a competition, transitioning the event into a true marine robotics forum. Besides the presence of exhibitors, a parallel presentation program was prepared that included four invited talks. Three of the talks came from the exhibitors and were given by Dr. Nikola Miskovic, Dr. Lorenzo Pollini and Mr. Jeremy Colombel. Another talk was given by Dr. Marko Thaler, CEO of Airnamics.
In addition to the invited talks, a new twist for this edition was the connection with the Robocademy FP7 EU project (www.robocademy.eu). In the framework of Robocademy a parallel workshop was organised for the final day of SAUC-E with 13 international PhD students coming from 10 institutions from all over Europe (Estonia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom). Robocademy activities at CMRE continued until 13 July 2016 as a hands-on experience on underwater robotics for young international talent. The Project aims at establishing an European training and research network to develop key skills and enabling technologies in the field for the exploration of the oceans, and therefore shares key values with SAUC-E. Veronika Yordanova from ATLAS Elektronik won the Best Oral Presentation Award.
SAUC-E 2016 may thus be considered a great success, consolidating its status as the leading marine robotics competition in Europe, with IEEE OES as a core sponsor. SAUC-E 2016 was not only a great competition, but also a robotics event that produced significant exposure in the scientific community through the parallel program of invited talks, exhibitors and a workshop dedicated to 13 PhD students.
We are proud of how far we’ve come in the 10 years’ of SAUC-E and our aim is to continue to develop SAUC-E as a unique event that challenges student teams with realistic conditions, with an increasing emphasis on multi-vehicle cooperation. These achievements were made possible thanks to the fundamental support of IEEE OES, ONRG and all our other sponsors. We thank all the teams, judges, exhibitors, visitors and everyone involved, who made SAUC-E 2016 such as a successful event.
Next year, SAUC-E will be again part of a larger and more complex competition. Following the experience of euRathlon 2015, a multi-domain competition for land, sea and air robots inspired by the Fukushima disaster will take place again in Italy, 15–23 September 2017. This new competition, the European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency, will be part of a larger framework, the European Robotics League (ERL). ERL is a similar event for robotics as the UEFA soccer Champions League is to football and gathers several competitions, both outdoor and indoor. The European Robotics League is funded through the H2020 RockEU2 European project coordinated by euRobotics AISBL. There is no need to say that we invite you all to participate in ERL Emergency in September 2017! Stay tuned on https://eu-robotics.net/robotics_league/ for news about ERL Emergency.
A YouTube video (in Italian) regarding SAUC-E 16 is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3438Vpq7W4
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.