June 2020 OES Beacon

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 and in the community more generally.  The TCs are at the very foundation of the Society and feed into many aspects of OES.  It is instructive to go back to the constitution to see that the Purpose is: The Society shall promote close cooperation and exchange of technical information among its members through publications and meetings. The Society shall foster the technical and professional growth of its members.

There are twelve TCs and about half of them are running workshops or symposia, and we have recently been seeing more reports of these activities in the Beacon.  We have now engaged the Singapore Chapter, under the capable control of Bharath Kalyan, to provide a template web page for each Technology Committee.  This is a win-win for OES because the TCs get their web pages and the Singapore Chapter gets a reasonable reward.  The idea is that OES members will be able to go to the TC web page at <ieeeoes.org/technical-activities/technology-committees>, scroll down to your favourite TC and click a link to the web page for that TC to see the complete palette of their activities.  Bharath is iterating the new TC pages through the respective chairs but by the time this issue of Beacon comes out the Autonomous Maritime Systems, Polar Oceans, Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning, and Standards should be close to having links to their web pages; and others will be following closely in their wake.

The TCs are carrying out their activities with financial support through the TC Activities Funding Scheme, but they do not have structured rosters of membership.  This causes extra work for the TC Chairs because they have to create and maintain their own lists of members.  We are addressing that by listing the TCs as “products” in the IEEE Memberships and Subscriptions Catalog under Technical Committees.  Some other Societies have already done this.  Members can then find and “purchase” them for $0 at the time of membership renewal (i.e., FREE), and this will be added to their membership record in the IEEE system.  Note that this is completely voluntary and the choice of TCs is yours.  I urge you to go to the Catalog and have a look sometime before you renew your membership later in the year.

There have been some quite big changes in the TCs over the last couple of years and now the creation of specific TC web pages, and an identified and active membership for each TC, marks a maturity where the TCs are taking their rightful place serving the PURPOSE of the Society.

And by the way: you can sign up for more than one of the following TCs if you wish.

The current OES Technology Committees are:

  • Autonomous Maritime Systems TC (AMS)
  • Current, Wave, Turbulence Measurement and Applications TC (CWTMA)
  • Data Analytics, Integration and Modeling TC (DAIM)
  • Ocean Observation Systems and Environmental Sustainability TC (OOSES)
  • Ocean Remote Sensing TC (ORS)
  • Ocean Sustainable Energy Systems (OSES)
  • Polar Oceans TC (PO)
  • Standards TC (STD)
  • Subsea Optics and Vision TC (SOV)
  • Underwater Acoustics TC (UA)
  • Underwater Cables and Connectors TC (UCC)
  • Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning TC (UCNP)