IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society Student Poster Awards

The 33rd IEEE OES Student Poster Competition has just been held at the OCEANS’13 conference and exhibition in San Diego, U.S.

Students were able to enjoy the opportunity of bringing their research to the eyes of the conference attendees by displaying and explaining their work, presented in 16 outstanding posters, selected from 100 received Abstracts. The students came from schools spread across Europe, Asia, the U.S. and Canada.

The program was organized and directed by K. Delaney as the local coordinator and by representatives from both organizing societies; Jill Zande from MTS and Christophe Sintes from IEEE-OES. Once again, the program was supported by funding from the U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research, enabling the students to attend the conference. The posters were judged by a team selected by MTS and IEEE-OES.

The student award winners were announced at the Thursday exhibitor’s luncheon. Dr. Sintes opened the awards ceremony and introduced Jill Zande and Kevin Delaney, who presented each student with a Certificate of Participation. The students were then all introduced as a group and received a round of applause from the conference attendees. The students were announced as members of the “OCEANS Student Poster Alumni Association”.

The roster of students and poster titles is:

•Daniel Coles; “Resource assessment of large marine current turbine arrays”
•Wen Liu: ‘Brushless DC Motor control system based on submarine hybrid transmission technology”
•Bruno Ferreira; “Localisation of a sound source: optimal positioning of sensors carried on autonomous surface vehicles”
•Sean Walstead; “Reconstructing surface wave profiles from forward scattered acoustic pulses”
•Ken Sooknanan; “Mosaics for Burrow detection in underwater surveillance video”
•Christopher Tomaszewski : ‘Planning efficient paths through dynamic flow fields in real world domains”
•Edward Richards; “Range limitations on acoustics adjoint inversions”
•Tomoko Takahashi: ‘Investigation of long pulse laser induced breakdown spectroscopy for analysis of the composition of rock and sediment samples submerged in seawater”
•Eric Piper; “Oil droplet fate in the gulf of Mexico”
•Natalia Hurtos; “A novel blending technique for two dimensional forward looking sonar mosaicking”
•Donya Frank: ‘Direct measurements of sediment response to wave with ‘smart sediments grains’”
•Samir Ouelha; “An extension of maximal marginal diversity based on feature selection applied to underwater acoustic data”
•Masaru Nagaso: ‘Development of the three dimensional visualization method for the inner structure of small size fish using 25MHz acoustic profile measurement”
•Akihisa Fukami: ‘Sub Bottom synthetic aperture sonar in robust circumstances”
•Luke Rumbaugh: ‘A 532nm Chaotic lidar transmitter for high resolution underwater ranging and imaging”

The founder of the Student Poster Competition, Norman Miller, could not attend the Oceans meeting. To commemorate his founding of the competition and the 600th participating student, MTS and IEEE OES have this year decided to name the first prize after him.

The winning students were announced by Mr. Garello and Mr. Michel, Presidents of IEEE OES and MTSrespectively, who presented the awards.

The honorable mention prize was given to Donia Frank.

The third prize of $1,000 was given to Sean Walstead.

The second prize of $2,000 was awarded to Luke Rumbaugh for his work on laser remote sensing underwater.

The first prize of $3,000, now named the Norman Miller award, went to Natalia Hurtos for her research in sonar image processing.

The winning students all received a spirited round of applause from the conference attendees for their accomplishments and participation in the Student Poster Program.