Nadir Kapetanović, Anja Babić, Ivan Lončar, Igor Kvasić, Barbara Arbanas, Matej Fabijanić, Jura Vuković, Maja Magdalenić, Goran Borković
OCEANS 2021 activities
In the week leading up to Breaking the Surface (BtS) 2021, our members were busy not only participating in the OCEANS 2021 conference, but also chairing some sessions. Anja chaired the session Buoy Technologies and presented her paper titled Developing the concept of multifunctional smart buoys. Igor presented his paper, Diver-Robot communication using wearable sensing diver glove used in ADRIATIC project, in the session Classification and Pattern Recognition (Parametric and Non-parametric), which he chaired. Nadir also chaired his session, Vehicle Design 1, where he presented the paper Towards a Heterogeneous Robotic System for Autonomous Inspection in Mariculture related to the HEKTOR project. Ivan chaired a session about Access, Custody, and Retrieval of Data. While the virtual aspects of chairing conference sessions seemed somewhat daunting at first, our members managed with aplomb – then dived right back into final BtS preparations, this year once again taking place in-person.
BtS 2021 workshop
Another very successful edition of the Breaking the Surface interdisciplinary field workshop on maritime robotics and applications was held in Biograd na Moru, Croatia, from 26 September to 3 October. This was the 13th year that BtS brought together experts from the fields of maritime robotics, marine biology, maritime archaeology, maritime security, and marine geology. This workshop is traditionally organized by the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST), and some of our members are instrumental in organizing this event. Our Vice-Chair, Igor Kvasić, was the chair of the technical committee of the workshop, and our other members, Anja Babić, Nadir Kapetanović, and Ivan Lončar, formed the technical committee together with several other LABUST members.
The workshop spanned five days of lectures, tutorials, and demos. The mornings started with a series of talks, briefly interrupted by a coffee break and networking opportunity, while the afternoons were filled with many interesting tutorials, demos, and company presentations. The event was attended by many experienced professionals from both academia and industry. What is particularly interesting about this event, in addition to its highly interdisciplinary nature and the many networking opportunities, is the percentage of students who attend. This year we had the opportunity to welcome many students from different levels of education, from Bachelor and Master students to many PhD students. For them, this workshop is a great opportunity to network with some of the most prestigious names in their field of study. BtS supports this exchange through both the formal format of lectures and workshops and a rich program of more casual social events.
One such occasion was an event organized by our Student Branch Chapter on Monday, 27 September. We organized a casual social event with music played by our younger members by the demo pool. Attendees had the opportunity to enjoy themselves and socialize with this musical backdrop – a perfect start to the week as many new contacts were made. We particularly encourage students to introduce themselves to established people in the field, and this relaxed atmosphere certainly helped the cause. Our Chair Anja, introduced our SBC and its activities to the auditorium. We believe that organizing this type of event helps to give visibility to our activities and is also good publicity for the society as a whole.
The workshop was officially closed by a gala dinner and a ceremony led by the BtS program chair and our SBC advisor prof. Nikola Mišković. During the ceremony, the IEEE OES VP for workshops and symposia expressed his satisfaction with another great BtS edition and confirmed the OES support for the next year.
As usual, the event concluded on Saturday with an excursion. This time, participants were taken by boat to the nearby Telašćica Nature Park, where they could enjoy nature and wonderful sights. This was a perfect ending to an amazing week and we can only say that we are already looking forward to next year!
HEKTOR project demo
One of the demos organized during the Breaking the Surface 2021 workshop was the demo about the results of the first half of the HEKTOR project. The demo was held on Tuesday, September the 28th, 2021. HEKTOR (Heterogeneous Autonomous Robotic System in Viticulture and Mariculture) project (http://hektor.fer.hr/) is looking for a solution to various issues in mariculture. Mariculture is heavily reliant on human labor, with workers generally doing arduous, repetitive, sometimes even dangerous tasks for long periods of time. Currently, divers must monitor fish farming cages for lengthy periods of time in all weather situations, even the most extreme.
The objective of the HEKTOR project in mariculture is to try for the first time in Croatia to include robotic systems (aerial, marine surface and underwater) in the process of cage fish farming for automated monitoring of fish cages. HEKTOR project proposes a heterogeneous robotic system consisting of an ROV, an ASV and a UAV for autonomous fish cage inspection missions. Based on the data fusion of the individually obtained information, the data from all three robots will be utilized for the final assessment of the fish cages.
The demo was to showcase a catamaran-shaped autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) named Korkyra, developed in-house in the scope of the HEKTOR project, and all its subsystems, namely the pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) surveillance camera, prototype of the landing platform, mounting of the short baseline acoustic localization system, and the model of the tether management system. Moreover, the integration of the Blueye ROV with ROS2 and the ASV was presented.
Attendees of the demo were very interested in the heterogeneous robotic system and all its subsystems. A useful discussion was started about topics ranging from visual detection and spatial map representation of biofouling, dual mode control of the ASV Korkyra by its 4 T200 thrusters and its booster electrical Minn Kota rear motor, mission planning, situational awareness of the ASV using its PTZ camera, to the performance of the WaterLinked Underwater GPS G2 system with the U1 Locator and future plans for the development of the small-scale tether management system and the landing platform.
Marine simulator tutorial
During day three of the workshop a Unity-based marine and maritime simulator developed by LABUST was showcased. The motivation for development of an in-house simulator for marine and maritime sprang from a newly funded Croatian national project, which concerns itself with developing an autonomous ship. Additionally, it is expected that other ongoing LABUST projects will benefit from the developed simulator. With the plan of open-sourcing the simulator to share the work and get constructive involvement from the community, we organized a tutorial. This event had the goal of presenting and demonstrating the simulator to the relevant community. An introductory presentation about the simulator capabilities familiarized the audience with problems encountered when developing marine robots and our approach in solving them. Following the lecture, the tutorial engaged participants by tasking them with creating an environment in the simulator, adding a surface vehicle with a multitude of sensors, and finally controlling it in live simulation. After the tutorial, participants gave constructive feedback and showed interest in using it in their own research projects.
BtS 2021 workshop – Undergraduate students’ angle
Much like during the previous years, IEEE OES UNIZG SBC tries to gather not only PhD students but also students from undergraduate and graduate studies. This year we invited our undergraduate students to the Breaking the Surface workshop so they got a chance to attend lectures about the state-of-the-art of marine robotics, but also help organize our SBC’s technical and social events. Moreover, some of them also had a chance to participate hands-on in HEKTOR project experiments with the Blueye Pro ROV. Their impressions are given below.
Matej Fabijanić: “Breaking the Surface is an international interdisciplinary field workshop of maritime robotics and applications. The 13th workshop brought together over 100 people from 39 universities and companies all around the world for 5 days of interesting lectures, useful workshops and tutorials, and hands-on demonstrations. With various topics from the fields of marine robotics, archaeology, and biology it would be quite difficult not to find something there that interests you, whether you are still a student or an international expert.
“Having worked with an underwater ROV for my third and final year as an undergraduate at University of Zagreb, specifically at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, attending the BtS workshop was a very interesting and cool experience. I was able to catch the first two days of speeches, presentations and demonstrations before college obligations caught up.
“Hearing first-hand experiences from people in the industry, as well as researchers from around the world opened my eyes to just how diverse marine robotics are. Literally spanning from vessels designed for shallow coastal regions and swamps up to submarines designed to dive down 3800 meters to the wreck of the RMS Titanic with a 5-person crew on board. That and everything in between could be seen at BtS this year.
“On the last two days of my stay in Biograd for the workshop I worked closely with researchers and mentors from LABUST, as well as a PhD student from Italy, to test movement algorithms based on computer-vision in a realistic environment. The resort at which BtS was taking place was situated near an Olympic pool filled with seawater that could be used for various testing purposes. Only after dropping the ROV I worked with for a whole year in Zagreb into the pool did we encounter errors and faults that needed to be fixed.
“The topic of my Final Paper dealt with monitoring underwater cages in fisheries in the Adriatic Sea. While working on it I rarely had the chance to talk about it with people outside of the faculty who were also team members of the project that the topic was a part of. Coming to BtS was a chance to hear people from all over the world speak about working on closely related problems and about their experience coming up with solutions and realizing them.”
Jura Vuković: “As for underwater systems and technologies I always thought of under the sea, lakes or rivers. I haven’t read a lot about karst explorations and its importance, so I found the presentation about robots for karst exploration really interesting and new for me. Drinking water is the most important thing for humans and sometimes it can be taken for granted. A lot of it comes from underground karst and exploiting these sources under the right conditions can be quite a challenge. Because of that, we should invest into researching this area. The presentation explained how the teams explored karst with robots as, due to the great difficulties and dangers of the terrain, divers intervening means risking their life. In my opinion, there is a future in researching these vast underground horizons.
“Since I was working with underwater robots for my undergraduate project and BSc thesis and since I am generally very interested in the field of marine robotics, attending the 2021 BtS workshop was a huge pleasure. The lectures that were presented were very interesting and the research done by participants is something I thought you could only see on the Discovery channel.”
Goran Borković: “I was very intrigued by the story about how even when not using advanced, expensive robots but rather some relatively simple devices for data collection purposes, it can be very challenging when dealing with large depths and ocean conditions that are hard to predict. There were also many examples of how much marine robotics and marine research is used for solving different problems that we face today. For example, underwater robots that can be used for discovering and exploring flooded cave systems that are inaccessible to humans and are potentially large sources of much needed drinking water. Also, as mentioned before, without a special probing device it is impossible to collect sufficient amounts of data (temperature, salinity, pH) that is for example mandatory for assessing the state and dealing with global warming.”
Maja Magdalenić: “As a guest of the BtS workshop, I had the opportunity to hear and see plenty of new things that have been developed or are still being developed in the field of marine robotics. Since I am interested in marine robotics and I am also a big fan of diving, what intrigued me the most was the Adriatic project, which aims to improve communication between the diver and his robotic partner, while the ultimate goal is to improve diving safety. Communication between robots and humans in general can be a challenging task, while in underwater conditions it’s even more difficult to accomplish. The development of such underwater communication can be very useful for detecting potential danger for a diver or sending help signals. The robotic partner is very useful, especially for diving in high-risk areas, as we don’t need a live diving buddy this way.
“In addition to the lecture about the Adriatic project, there was also a demonstration in which I had the opportunity to go through a diving simulation with a robotic partner in the form of a game with different tasks that need to be performed. The game gives a pretty realistic view in the world of diving with the robotic partner and it also brings a lot of fun. In addition to other interesting things in the field of diving and marine robotics, I met people of the same interests, hung out with them and exchanged experiences which is also the goal of this event.”
Taking into account these testimonies from our first-time student participants, the BtS workshop is a very useful event to hear and learn new things in the field of marine robotics and robotics in general. It also presents a great opportunity to meet people with similar interests and areas of work and connect with experts in the field. And after all of the above, you can still find some free time to look around the small Croatian town of Biograd na Moru and relax in the beautiful nature that surrounds it.
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.