WUWNet’23 Pioneer Award
WUWNet’23 Keynote Speakers
 | Jen-Hwa Guo is a professor at Department of Engineering Science and Ocean Engineering at Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, U.S.A. in 1992. He served as the head of the marine exploration technology division at Taiwan Ocean Research Institute, focusing on developing deep-sea scientific AUV/ROV R&D from 1998 to 2012. He has been a consulting board member for the underwater culture heritage of the Ministry of Culture of Taiwan since 2018. In 2019-2022, he was a board member of the Transportation Safety Board, and since 2023, he has been a Joint Appointment Research Fellow in the Academia Sinica Taiwan. He co-organized the 2004 IEEE Symposium of Underwater Technology and Taipei's 2014 MTS/IEEE OCEANS conference. Since 2015, he has co-organized an academic group to design a 1-MW floating-type Kuroshio turbine project to establish analytical tools for the system and the mooring and anchorage systems to generate intellectual property for the ocean's current energy industrial technology. His current research interests are sensing and controlling biomimetic underwater robots, navigation of autonomous vehicle fleets, design of ocean current power generation devices, and AUV applications in underwater archaeology. |
 | Wen Xu is presently a QIUSHI Honored professor in the Ocean College and College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University. He received the B.E. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1990, M.S. degree from the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993, and Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001. From 1993 to 1996, he was a research engineer with the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was with the Ocean Acoustics Group, MIT, as a research scientist from 2001 to 2002, and with the Teledyne RD Instruments as a research scientist/senior research scientist from 2003 to 2007. His research has concerned statistical and array signal processing in general and in applications to sonar, radar, and communication systems, and most recently to underwater sensor networks. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and an editorial board member of the Chinese Journal of Acoustics. |
 | Ian F. Akyildiz is the Ken Byers Chair Professor Emeritus in Telecommunications, Past Chair of the Telecom group at the ECE and the Director of the Broadband Wireless Networking Laboratory between (1985-2020) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 1978, 1981 and 1984, respectively. Currently, he is the President and CTO of the Truva Inc. since March 1989. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates since June 1, 2020. He is also an Adjunct Professor with the University of Helsinki since 2021, University of Iceland since 2020, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) since 2019. Dr. Akyildiz is also a Visiting Distinguished Professor with the Shiv Nadar University, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, India since October 2019. |
 | Kunde Yang professor, PhD supervisor, and serve as the dean of the Ocean Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University. He is currently the director of the Key Laboratory of Ocean Acoustics and Sensing, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the deputy director of a State Key Laboratory. Coauthored 8 monograph books, published more than 170 SCI papers, and obtained more than 70 authorized patents. He has been engaged in the research of Ocean environment and acoustics, underwater acoustic signal and information processing, underwater acoustic system design, over-the-horizon information transmission at sea, etc. He has hosted over more than 30 projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Major Projects, and Key Pre-research Projects, and served as the Chief Scientist of ocean acoustic survey voyages seven times. He has won the second prize of the National Award for Technological Invention (ranked first), first prize of Science and Technology Progress of Ministry of Education (ranked first), and other nine Ministerial and Provincial-Level Science and Technology Awards. He has been awarded the titles of “National Science and Technology Innovation Leading Talents”, “Changjiang Scholar Distinguished Professor”. |
 | Milica Stojanovic is a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. She is also a permanent Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and was a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is affiliated with the AUV Laboratory. She graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988 (summa cum laude), and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. Professor Stojanovic spent a considerable part of her research career as a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also served as an Associate Director for Research at the MIT Sea Grant College Program. Professor Stojanovic is an IEEE Fellow (2010), for contributions to underwater acoustic communications, a recipient of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Distinguished Technical Achievement Award (2015), IEEE WICE Outstanding Achievement Award (2019), and the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Distinguished Lecturer (2018). |