Stony Brook Southampton Hosts Water Acoustics Bootcamp

The team of researchers in charge of transmitting the underwater acoustic signal. From left to right: Manan Mittal, Kyle Dalton, Austin Lu, Diego Cuji, David Campos Anchieta, and Camille Wardlaw.

Stony Brook Southampton recently hosted a bootcamp where students across the country had the opportunity to collaborate on underwater acoustics research.

Students and professors worked together to conduct water acoustic experiments to transmit, sense, and measure different underwater acoustic signals. With funding from the Office of Naval Research, Dean Andrew Singer of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences organized the week-long activity together with Professor Joseph Warren from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and Professor Grant Deane from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

"The students had a hands-on, experiential learning opportunity that started with work in the laboratory," said Singer. "They learned to calibrate acoustic hydrophones and transducers, then took this knowledge into underwater testbeds at the Stony Brook Marine Science Station in Southampton. They then designed and fielded underwater acoustic communications experiments at sea, in the Atlantic Ocean, and off the coast of Long Island, aboard two of our research vessels."

The Paumanok, one of the boats used in the underwater acoustics experiment. One boat transmitted signals while another boat received them.

The bootcamp served as a way for students to get their hands dirty with underwater acoustic equipment and to collaborate with new team members from a variety of universities across the northeastern United States. Students attended from Northeastern, Penn State, the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and more.

Divided into five groups, bootcamp attendees worked together on the same set of experiments, each group with a different focus. Students rotated their team members daily to ensure everyone received a well-rounded experience. While students were doing most of the hands-on work, professors distilled their knowledge and expertise.

The goal of the experiments was to calibrate equipment and then measure how well certain communication signals could be transmitted and detected through the ocean. The final day of experiments culminated in an excursion into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island. There were two boats - one boat that transmitted a communication signal using an underwater speaker, and a second boat that received the signal using an array of underwater hydrophones. Sound travels differently underwater than in air because factors such as temperature and pressure have an impact on the speed of propagation. Students measured how well the receiver array was able to detect and decode the transmitted communication signal.

Grant Deane talking to a group of researchers inside of a boat cabin. From left to right: Manan Mittal, Dariush Kari, David Campos Anchieta, Austin Lu, Yongjie Zhuang, Diego Cuji, and Muhammad Mudassir Jawaid.

The bootcamp gave students the chance to design and conduct these experiments themselves rather than simply performing analyses on data that was borrowed from other sources. This valuable opportunity for many took more than a year of planning to bring the event to life.

Yongjie Zhuang, a postdoctoral researcher at Stony Brook University helped coordinate and plan the bootcamp.

"So many of the new students and grad students probably have worked on underwater acoustic signal processing for some time, like a few years, but they didn't have the actual hands-on chance to do those experiments," Zhuang said. "We usually download data online from other people's experiments. But this bootcamp can give everybody a chance to actually do these experiments."

The students had to learn how to conquer challenges in their experiments and quickly adapt. The boat that received the signals had some technical difficulties that students had to overcome and manage.

CEAS Dean Andrew Singer with students on one of the bootcamp boats.

"If something goes wrong, it's up to you to fix it," said Manan Mittal, a Stony Brook University graduate student from the event. "Because if you are out on the water without the professors, then that's exactly what we would need to do."

In addition to the hands-on experience, students became more excited about the subject of underwater acoustics.

"Part of the goal was to get not only me but also other students excited about underwater acoustics research, and I'd say that the boot camp successfully did that for me," said Mittal. "I'm quite interested in the material now."

Deane plans to host another bootcamp in San Diego in the upcoming months for students on the west coast. Stony Brook University also aims to host this east coast bootcamp again next year.

- Angelina Livigni

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