December 2021 Beacon

Chapter News (December 2021)

Submit Chapter news to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator

Japan Chapter

OES Japan Chapter Distinguished Lecture Program

Reported by Harumi Sugimatsu, OES-J Vice Chair

The first “OES Japan Distinguished Lecture Program” for young people, in collaboration with the Techno Ocean Network (TON: https://www.techno-ocean.com/en/), was held in Kobe on July 25th, 2021.  The lecture was given as one of the Pre-Events of Techno-Ocean 2021(https://www.techno-ocean2021.jp/en/).

Tamaki Ura, OES Distinguished Lecturer, gave a talk on the underwater robots to encourage the young to be a marine engineer. Due to the COVID-19, the number of participants was limited, but, after the talk, attendees enjoyed the experiences of programming and operation of the underwater robots.

 

Tamaki Ura and the participants
Enjoying the underwater robot operation

 

The 6th Underwater Technology Forum ZERO – Online

Reported by Harumi Sugimatsu, OES-J Vice Chair

The 6th Underwater Technology Forum・ZERO was held online from 13:00 to 17:00 on 8 October 2021, on the U-Tokyo Kashiwa  Campus in Chiba.  Since the state of emergency due to COVID-19 was over, the organizers and several speakers met and shared the information in a face-to-face meeting at the venue, and gave the lectures to online attendees.

The topics of this forum are as follows;

  • Discovery of genes that prevent animals to migrate from the ocean onto the freshwater and the land
  • Nishino-Shima Island now – Challenge to monitor the volcanic eruptions of the isolated island in the sea
  • Nishino-Shima Island Investigation by a low-cost AUV “HATTORI”
  • Comprehensive EEZ management Offshore base networking -Review of “Grand Design for the OCEAN in the 21st Century” by Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) in 2000
  • AUV SPICE-1 challenge to the North Sea!
  • Expanding the possibilities of underwater monitoring with the “Amphibious drone”
  • Top predator in the deep sea – Discovery of a new species, a giant deep-sea fish “Narcetes shonan”

More than 260 people participated in the forum and enjoyed the discussions.  The next forum will be held on April 22nd 2022.  We hope that a larger audience can attend the next forum face-to-face.

 

Speaker at the venue
Speakers at the venue
Speakers at the venue
From the talk “Nishino-Shima Island now”
From the talk “low-cost AUV”
From the talk “Amphibious drone”
From the talk “Top predator in the deep sea”

 

Singapore Chapter

Chapter-Activity Report for the Year 2020-21

Reported by Bharath Kalyan & Hari Vishnu

Figure 1: Divers on horseback – A 19th century French postcard possibly depicting underwater navigation/communication (An illustration used by Prof Stojanovic during her presentation)

The Singapore chapter has been active in organizing technical talks and various administrative meetings. Due to COVID-19 related restrictions, all meetings were held in a virtual setting with no in-person social events in 2021. In the middle of this year, we organized a talk by Prof Milica Stojanovic from the Northeastern University. It was organized as part of the on-going distinguished lecture series. The talk was titled “Multicarrier Acoustic Communication in Doppler-limited Regimes” and was presented as a virtual session on May 25th, 2021. The lecture was aimed at learning custom made Doppler compensation methods and their application to multi-carrier systems with an aim to improve performance under extreme Doppler distortion scenarios.

Figure 2: Snippets from DL series

Several chapter members helped to solicit papers and organize a special session on underwater competitions in the just completed OCEANS 2021 San Diego-Porto hybrid conference (20 – 23 September 2021). One of our chapter members was on the local organizing committee for this conference as publicity chair. Some of our members also chaired some sessions at the conference.

OES Singapore chapter migrated its website from Google pages to Github pages for ease of editing, versioning, and flexibility (new website available at ieeeoessg.org/). The chapter members are involved in setting up the technology committee (TC) websites under the VPTA initiative. We have already setup 3 OES TC websites

  1. Autonomous Marine Systems Technology Committee,
  2. Polar Oceans Technology Committee, and
  3. Underwater Communications Technology Committee.
Figure 2: Snippets from DL series

Our Young Professional members have been involved in OES efforts as part of the ongoing UN Ocean Decade and helped towards making a video for the Global Virtual early career ocean professionals (ECOP) day, that is available on the OES YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/JnU2gr4hGLg). They are also helping with making other videos as part of the OES outreach initiative. The chapter members have also been involved with OES global social media updates, Earthzine article management and website update, and conference publicity support. Apart from this, one of the chapter members delivered a talk at the IEEE Delhi section titled “Studying climate-change induced Arctic ice melting using an acoustics-based approach” on the 29th of September, 2021.

The chapter held two administrative meetings along with an annual general body meeting (AGM). The AGM held on the 15th of October, 2021, concluded with an election nominating the 2022 executive committee. The nominated 2022 executive committee members are listed below.

  • Hari Vishnu (Chair)
  • Bharath Kalyan (Vice Chair)
  • Rajat Mishra (Secretary)
  • Too Yuen Min (Treasurer)
  • Mandar Chitre (Exco Member)
  • Manu Ignatius (Exco Member)
  • Koay Teong Beng (Exco Member)
  • Chi Cheng (Exco Member)

The annual flagship Singapore AUV challenge (SAUVC) was cancelled for the year 2021 due to COVID-19 related restrictions. The chapter is gearing up for hosting SAUVC 2022 alongside the prestigious AUV Symposium. The event dates are listed below.

  • IEEE OES AUV Symposium: September 19 – 22, 2022. Please visit auv2022.org for more details.
  • SAUVC 2022: September 23 – 26, 2022. Please visit sauvc.org for more details.