A Blast from the Past! . . . Our Fearless OES Leaders!
Bob Wernli—Beacon Co-Editor-in-Chief, Photos by Stan Chamberlain And, let’s not forget those past Presidents who started and cared for our society: Donald M. Bolle, 1981–1982…
OES AdCom Election Results
The following candidates have been elected for a three-year term, starting on January, 1st 2020, as Administrative Committee members. The response rate was 22.17 %,…
Who’s Who in the OES – João Alves
João Alves, IEEE Senior Member, OES AdCom Member When I was recently preparing a presentation on the topic of maritime unmanned systems, I came to…
Chapter News (March 2019)
Submit Chapter News to Beacon Co-Editors and OES Chapter Coordinator IEEE Oceanic Engineering Chapter of the Canadian Atlantic Section (OES—CAS) by: Dr. Ferial El-Hawary, IEEE…
Member Highlights (March 2019)
Katsunori Mizuno, Beacon Associate Editor As part of the University of Tokyo’s Young Researchers Overseas Program, I am staying in Marseille, France, where the next…
OES Mid-Career Rising Star and Lifetime Achievement 2018 Awards
Hanumant Singh, OES Member The OES Autonomous Marine Vehicle Awards ceremony was held during the AUV 2018 Symposium in Porto, Portugal on 8 November 2018.…
From the IEEE OES Webmaster (March 2019)
Steve Holt, IEEE OES Webmaster We are now entering the year 2019 with a wide range of activities underway with our OES website. One annual…
Scope of the OES Professional Activities Area
Jim Collins, Vice President of Professional Activities In recent years there has been a major shift in the focus of OES Professional Activities facilitated by…
Awards for OES members
Contact the Editors With Your Submissions Ferial El-Hawary is the recipient of 2017 “The Murugan Memorial Award” and 2018 “Life Member Appreciation Citation Award” by…
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…
The New OES Vice-President for OCEANS
John Watson, New Vice President for OCEANS Hello to you all. I’d like to introduce myself to you as the Oceanic Engineering Society’s newly appointed…
From the Vice President for Workshops and Symposia
Philippe Courmontagne, Vice President for W&S By the way of loans to support the startup of a conference/workshop/symposium, or grants to support student participation or…
VPTA Report—Distinguished Lecturer Program
Malcolm Heron, OES Vice President for Technical Activities We welcomed three newly appointed Distinguished Lecturers to the DL Roster on 1 January. DLs are appointed…
From the OES BEACON Editors (March 2019)
Harumi Sugimatsu and Robert Wernli Welcome to the March 2019 issue of the Beacon as we start a new year that includes many new AdCom…
Member Benefits—Did You know?
Your Action Required This Could be Your Last Paper Copy of the BEACON! As an OES Member, You Must “Opt-In” to Continue Receiving Your Paper…
Obituaries of Three OES Colleagues
We have lost three OES colleagues in September 2018. Jean-Pierre Hermand, Edmund Sullivan and John E. Ehrenberg. The following obituaries for them were prepared by…
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.
Dr. Marcia Isakson received a B.S. with a double major in engineering physics and mathematics from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1992. Upon graduation, she was awarded the Hertz Foundation Fellowship for the study of atomic and molecular physics. She earned her M.A. in atomic and molecular physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1994. From 1994 to 1997, Isakson served as an officer in the United States Army at Fort Hood, Texas. In 1997, CPT Isakson was honorably discharged. In 2002, she earned a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin. In the summer of 2001, she began work on acoustics at Applied Research Laboratories at the University of Texas at Austin.
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. Albert J. Williams 3rd (Sandy) received his AB in Physics from Swarthmore College in 1962 and his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1969. He spent his entire career at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, becoming Scientist Emeritus in 2002. A Fellow of IEEE, he received the Distinguished Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE/Oceanic Engineering Society in 2000 and is presently VP Technical Activities for OES. His research interests are microstructure and mixing, flow measurements, oceanographic instrumentation and measurements, sediment transport, and turbulent boundary layers. He designs and manufactures acoustic travel-time current meters for measurement of current, waves, and turbulence.
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.