Plenary Speakers for OCEANS'17 Aberdeen
As at all OCEANS Conferences the opening day is always started off with a Plenary session featuring distinguished speakers form the world of OCEAN science, technology and management. For Aberdeen we are happy to announce that the first two of our Plenary speakers are Professor Anne Glover and Dr Stef Kapusniak providing a clear indication that OCEANS truly provides the strong links between academia and industry.
Professor Dame Anne Glover has pursued a distinguished career in microbiology, and has held positions of the first Chief Scientific Adviser to Scotland and then the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission. Professor Glover is now a Vice-Principal of the University of Aberdeen.
Dame Anne Glover's plenary talk is entitled Developing Innovation and will talk about the preconditions and partnerships which are crucial to developing innovation for academic and industrial research and project development. Particular attention will be given to innovation in oceanic engineering, science and technology.
Stef Kapusniak is Business Development Manager – Mining with Soil Machine Dynamics (SMD). Prior to joining SMD, Stef worked in the surface and underground mining industry, mainly in Australia. He has previously held roles in Australia as Mine Manager, Technical Services Manager, Preparation Plant Manager, Principal Mining Engineer, Senior Mining Engineer and Senior Geotechnical Engineer for a variety of companies. During his Australian career he received a ministerial appointment to the West Australian Coal Mines Examination Board. He gained a BSc in Mining Engineering and a PhD in Rock Mechanics from the University of Nottingham in the early eighties and holds both underground and opencut Mine Manager’s tickets. He has also directed large construction Joint Ventures and framework contracts in the Transport and Utilities sectors in the UK.
His talk is entitled: Underwater Mining – worldwide developments and emerging market opportunities. An overview of the underwater solid minerals industry will be presented, highlighting potential opportunities for traditional maritime organisations. The presentation will cover key technological, legal, economic and environmental aspects associated with both deep-sea and shallow water mining activities. Reference will be made to the status of major industrial offshore mining projects and to associated scientific research activity.
Dr Gareth Davies studied Marine Biology at Heriot-Watt University and graduated with first class honours in Marine Biology and a PhD examining the biology of deep sea Scaphopod molluscs from the Rockall Trough. He then worked with the university spin-outs the Institute of Offshore Engineering (IOE), the International Centre for Island Technology (ICIT) and Environment and Resource Technology (ERT). In 2000 Gareth set-up Aquatera: a private consultancy group specialising in environmental energy related consultancy and surveying activity. This organisation has become a global leader in the marine renewables sector and has a prodigious international portfolio of oil & gas projects. Gareth is also a Director of Orcades Marine Management Consultants, a sister company of Aquatera, which provides high quality management of marine operations in harsh operating environments, along with a suite of related maritime services.
His keynote talk, Marine Renewables and the Future, will provide an overview of current European R&D projects developing new sensor technologies and focus on an end-to-end approach of the value chain of ocean observation, also addressing proposed transversal innovations to the community. A cross-cutting aspect of the presentation will be the potential and challenges of integrating new developments on current commercial autonomous platforms.
Eric Delory, Dr.-Ing.Eric has worked in environmental science and bioengineering in positions ranging from applied research to management, in Europe and Asia. He started his career developing hardware solutions and signal processing algorithms for biomedical and environmental sensing applications, such as the impact of sound on sensory systems. In the nineties he worked four years at the National University of Singapore, where he was part of the founding team of the Acoustic Research Laboratory. Back to Europe he contributed to create the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at the Technical University of Catalonia. Willing to broaden his scientific and technical scope, his interest expanded then to multidisciplinary observing systems, working with the IEEE on the implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), for which he became a liaison for the European Seas Observatory Network ESONET. Eric currently leads the research and development activities of the observatory of the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN). He coordinates the transnational access activities of the European Fixed Open-Ocean Observatories Consortium FixO3 and co-leads the new technologies work-package in AtlantOS. He coordinates NeXOS, a 21-partner European collaborative project developing compact cost-effective sensors, optical and acoustic, for the monitoring of ocean variables.
His keynote talk, Emerging solutions for in-situ observation systems, will provide an overview of current European R&D projects developing new sensor technologies and focus on an end-to-end approach of the value chain of ocean observation, also addressing proposed transversal innovations to the community. A cross-cutting aspect of the presentation will be the potential and challenges of integrating new developments on current commercial autonomous platforms.
Professor Rene Garello Past President of IEEE/OES
2017 is the year we celebrate the 60th occurrence of the international Conference & Exhibition OCEANS sponsored by IEEE OES (Oceanic Engineering Society) and by MTS (Marine Technology Society). This will be the 48th year in a row for such an event, started for the first time in 1970 - with the name OCEAN - and under the auspices of the OES ancestor, OCC – the Oceanography Coordinating Committee initiated by IEEE and the Geoscience Electronics Group. Since 1975 when MTS joined as a co-sponsor, the event has been able to bring to the world the best achievements in both the academic and corporate communities.
Since 2005 and the inception of the two OCEANS-a-year concept, we now offer a truly and fully international event. Indeed, at “mid-term” 24 years after its creation - OCEANS went outside Northern America for the first time in 1994, in Brest, France. And then, again in France (Nice) in 1998 and in Japan (Kobe) in 2004 – three times in 34 years! And now 13 times over the last 13 years, visiting 14 different countries (including the US and Canada).
So, OCEANS Aberdeen will be the 60th edition overall and the 16th international venue (i.e. outside North America).
We welcome you for the celebration of the event in beautiful Scotland.
