Kento Takemoto, Yang Teni, Motoki Sakai, Yew Qi Ming, The University of Tokyo Introduction On August 24 and 25, students and enthusiasts gathered at JAMSTEC…
Workshop Recap: STEM Remotely Operated Vehicle 2024
Zainah Md. Zain, IEEE OES Malaysia Chapter Secretary and Zool Hilmi Ismail, IEEE OES Malaysia Chapter Chair The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Underwater…
IEEE OES IIT Chennai Student Branch Chapter Report
Sridhar K, Chair of IEEE OES IIT Chennai Student Branch Chapter Guest Lecture by Dr. Hari Vishnu, Senior Research Fellow, NUS and IEEE OES Secretary…
Who’s who in the IEEE OES
Son-Cheol YU, IEEE OES Korea Chapter Chair, Professor of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) I started my academic career at Prof. Ura’s laboratory…
A New Core for the Phyto-Finders
Todd Morrison, OES member Intrepid OES mentors, Drs. Todd and Hilary Morrison, once again traveled to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to meet with…
A Blast from the Past! . . . Remembering Jim Barbera
Bob Wernli – Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief and Photographer Stan Chamberlain Unfortunately, this issue includes the obituary of one of our leading members, Jim Barbera, a little…
OES WIE PROPEL Laureate in OCEANS Singapore 2024
Nicole Macas, WIE Propel (2023-2024) and Grace Mena, WIE Propel (2024-2025) An empowering experience Reported by Nicole Macas The OCEANS Singapore conference was a wonderful…
China Ocean Acoustics (COA) 2024
H2O Competition 2024 Suleman Mazhar, TPC Co-Chair, COA 2024 and Qi Bin, Harbin Engineering University The third IEEE/OES China Ocean Acoustics Conference 2024 was held…
Distinguished Lecturer Experiences
Peng Ren, OES Distinguished Lecturer from 2024-2026, China University of Petroleum (East China) I was honored to be appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the…
The 2024 Tau Autonomy Centre Challenge
Prof. John R. Potter, NTNU, Fellow IEEE Chances are, you’ve not heard of the Tau Autonomy Centre Challenge (TAC Challenge), or even of Tau, a…
Panel session on “Ocean Observing Platforms and Technologies for Ocean Decade: Prospects and Perspectives” at OCEANS 2024 Singapore
Filippo Campagnaro (OES Young Professional 2023-2024) and Hari Vishnu (Acoustic Research Laboratory, National University of Singapore) On Wednesday, 17 April, 2023, during the OCEANS Conference…
Chapter News (September 2024)
Submit Chapter news to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator Japan Chapter OES Japan Annual meeting Reported by Harumi Sugimatsu The annual meeting of…
OES/MTS Young Professional Luncheon event at OCEANS 2024 Singapore
Roberto Petroccia, Gaultier Real, Karen Renninger During the last OCEANS Conference in Singapore (14-18 April 2024), the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (OES) and the Marine…
Obituary for Jim Barbera
Edited by Robert Wernli and Harumi Sugimatsu It is with sadness that I have to report the passing of one of our greatest members, Jim…
Introduction of a new Beacon Associate Editor
Takahiro Sano, A new Beacon Associate Editor from July 16, 2024 We are pleased to introduce you to a new Beacon Associate Editor, Takahiro Sano. …
From the Journal Editor’s desk (September 2024)
Karl von Ellenrieder, Journal Editor-in-Chief Firstly, I would like to welcome Margaret Hayden to the Journal of Oceanic Engineering (JOE) as our new Editorial Assistant.…
VP OCEANS Report (September 2024)
Venugopalan Pallayil, Vice President for OCEANS (VPO) Dear Colleagues, As many of you probably would have heard by now, the OCEANS Conference is taking a…
From the Vice President for Workshops & Symposia (September 2024)
Gerardo “Gerry” Acosta, VP for W&S Since our last meeting on these lines, our OES kept on having a great deal of workshops and symposia…
From the VP For Professional Activities (September 2024)
Elizabeth Creed, Vice President for Professional Activities It is hard to believe that we are rapidly approaching the final quarter of 2024. The first eight…
VPTA Column (September 2024)
Shyam Madhusudhana, VP for Technical Activities It’s been a good year so far with relatively smooth progress in our technical activities. The Technology Committees (TCs)…
Executive VP Report (September 2024)
Malcolm Heron, a new Executive VP “Advancing Technology for Humanity” is on the logo of IEEE. During the revision of the Oceanic Engineering Society Strategic…
Moving Forward Together
Brandy Armstrong, President, president@beacon.ieeeoes.org Uniting for a Common Purpose As I sit down to write this message, I am deeply aware of the challenges OES…
From the OES BEACON Editors (September 2024)
Harumi Sugimatsu and Robert Wernli Our September issue of the Beacon follows a summer where, hopefully, everyone enjoyed some time off. This is reflected on…
An Unprecedented Voyage on ‘The Falkor (too)’ Research Vessel
Monika Agrawal, IIT Delhi Student Branch Chapter Advisor The OES Initiative program “Berth of Opportunity” started from 2022 matches OES members who are students or…
OTC Asia 2024 Experiences
Student members of the OES Malaysia Chapter At OTC Asia 2024, student members of the OES Malaysia Chapter volunteered to support OES promotions. The…


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.