Jeff Dusek, Student Activities Chair When I learned I had the opportunity to serve as the Oceanic Engineering Society Student Activities Chair in early February,…
From the Vice President for W&S – A COVID-19 Update
Philippe Courmontagne, Vice President for W&S For 2020 and 2021, IEEE OES is involved in several upcoming events as a co-sponsor. But this year is…
New DLs from 2020 to 2023
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities We have three new DLs from 2020 to 2023. Donna M. Kocak John R. Potter Tamaki Ura…
Call for OES Distinguished Lecturers Nominations for 2021–2023 Close July 31, 2020
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities The IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) invites nominations for OES Distinguished Lecturers. The IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturers…
VPTA Column: Celebrating the Maturity of Technology Committees
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities The Technology Committees Coordinator, Shyam Madhusudhana, has been busy raising the visibility of the TCs inside OES…
From the OES BEACON Editors (June 2020)
Harumi Sugimatsu and Robert Wernli Welcome to the June 2020 issue of the Beacon. As you can see in the photos, your Beacon editors are…
Welcome New and Reinstated Members (June 2020)
Australia John A Risson Canada Sam Decosse Bruce Gordon Joseph Martin China Zhou Quanbin Chi Wu Colombia Jeisson Alexander Giraldo Tique Ecuador Angelica Maria Bustos…
As a new OES Calendar Coordinator – Stephanie Kemna
Stephanie Kemna, OES Calendar Coordinator Hi all! I am Stephanie Kemna, former IEEE OES Young Professional (YP) Boost recipient for 2019, and now OES Calendar…
From the Journal Editor’s desk: IEEE Journal of Engineering Early Access Papers
Mandar Chitre, Journal Editor-in Chief Congratulations to the authors of our most recently approved papers for the IEEE JOE. The following papers were published as…
Trajectory of the Team Clairvoyance
Kenichi Fujita, Yuya Hamamatsu and Hiroya Yatagai (The University of Tokyo) The “Team Clairvoyance”, the student team from the University of Tokyo for underwater robot…
New Year, New Member Opportunities
Brandy Armstrong, VP of Professional Activities It’s been a busy few months in my new role as VP of Professional Activities. Fortunately, I was able…
OES Society Award – Mohd Rizal Arshad received the 2019 Presidential Award
Mohd Rizal Arshad received the 2019 Presidential Award at the OES ExCom meeting in Singapore in December 2019. Congratulations! Mohd Rizal Arshad organised USYS conf…
Awards for OES members
Contact the editors with your submissions. Jerry C. Carroll Inducted into Naval Oceanography Hall of Fame Jerry C. Carroll, OES Senior Past President, was inducted…
Marine Debris Indicators: What’s Next? – Workshop Summary Report
An IEEE OES event 16-18 December 2019-Brest, FRANCE René Garello, OES Junior Past President This workshop was sponsored by: THE WORKSHOP The workshop on “Marine…
The OES Newsletter – A Beacon Beaming the Activities of the Society for Fifty Years
Stan Chamberlain (Initial OES President) and Fred Maltz (longest serving OESNL Editor) The Early Years: 1970 – 1990 The newsletter (NL) of the Oceanic…
The Science We Need for the Ocean We Want
Regional Planning Workshop for the Northern/Central Indian Ocean countries as well as ROPME sea area towards the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development…
Welcome to COA 2020!
2nd IEEE/OES China Ocean Acoustics Conference -COA 2020, Harbin, China, 27-30 July 2020 *Updated The 2016 IEEE / OES China Ocean Acoustics Symposium (COA2016), initiated…
Offshore Technology Conference
Jerry C. Carroll, Senior Past President, OTC Board of Directors Founded in 1969, the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) organizes the world’s foremost events for…
Who’s who in the OES (March 2020)
Christopher Whitt, OES AdCom. member I have been around the ocean my whole life. I was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and…
Chapter News (March 2020)
Submit Chapter news to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator Japan Chapter – Workshop on Scientific Use of Submarine Cables & Related Technology Reported by Harumi…
Call for OES Distinguished Lecturers NOMINATIONS FOR 2021-2023 CLOSE July 31, 2020
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities The IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) invites nominations for OES Distinguished Lecturers. The IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturers…
Request for Nominations for OES Awards 2020
René Garello, Chair of IEEE/OES Nominations and Appointments Committees, Junior Past President Each year at the beginning of January, the Oceanic Engineering Society is…
VPTA Column: Carrying on…
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities I started writing this column with Plan A in mind to say that the year was getting…
From the President (March 2020)
Christian de Moustier, OES President Calendar year 2020 is a leap year. In our epoch, this means an extra day at the end of February…
A Blast from the Past! . . . And a Look at Our Future
Bob Wernli – Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief, photos by Stan Chamberlain Many of our OES members are, how shall I say it . . . “very experienced.”…


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.