Dr. Perry Naughton successfully defended his PhD titled “Self-localization of a mobile swarm of underwater vehicles using ambient acoustic noise”. His thesis developed a series of techniques that enabled swarms of underwater vehicles to determine their positions by only listening to the ambient ocean noise.

Underwater localization is an important yet difficult problem since water severely attenuates the GPS signals — it only propagates very short distances (tens of centimeters) and thus we typically rely on active acoustic solutions to localize underwater vehicles. These require extensive infrastructure (e.g., deploying buoys) or are costly (e.g., a Doppler velocity logger costs thousands of USD). Using ambient noise is attractive since it only requires the vehicles to have a microphone which simple and cheap (only tens of USD). Perry’s research showed that it is possible to estimate the geometry of a swarm of mobile, underwater vehicles with ambient acoustic noise.

Doing this work required a large network of collaborators. Perry worked closely with the Jaffe Lab to use their Autonomous Underwater Explorers to validate his ideas. And he spent a year in Grenoble working closely with Philippe Roux on some of the more theoretical aspects of his research. Additionally, he worked with a number of other scientists as part of Engineers for Exploration and CISA3. His “side projects” involved imaging shipwrecks, scanning archaeological sites, and creating large-scale 3D models of coral reefs.

Perry received a large number of fellowships and awards over the years including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, NSF Integrative Training and Research Award, NSF Graduate Opportunities World Wide, Chateaubriand STEM Scholarship (French Embassy), Friends of the International Center Scholarship, ARCS Foundation, and the Henry Booker Prize for Ethical Engineering.

Congrats Dr. Naughton! You’ve had an impressive UCSD career over the past decade (Perry was an undergrad here before doing his PhD). You will be missed, but we look forward to seeing the great things that you will do.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering gave Dustin Richmond one of its annual awards for “Excellence in Service/Leadership”. Dustin has been a key leader in departmental activities since the day that he arrived N years ago. He has been an active community leader in our department, interacting with staff, students, and faculty to improve our community by organizing and motivating others to do the same. For example, he was the student chair of the department Graduate Community Council. As part of this, he proposed, designed, and oversaw the remodel of Chez Bob. These changes have transformed the lounge into a common meeting area. For several years he also managed the Graduate Student Association budget, allocating money to ideas and projects that improve the quality of life, evaluating and funding ideas that clearly benefit a broad swath of the department, and helping students make their ideas a reality. Dustin also organized an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Panel, where current applicants can ask questions, and receive feedback about their essay writing service. He has mentored and encouraged other students in the community and recruited faculty with past NSF application experience to participate. This provides a valuable benefit to incoming graduate students and outgoing undergraduate students in our department. These are just some of the highlights; he has done so much more!

Thanks for all your efforts Dustin. Very often these sorts of things go unnoticed. I’m glad that was not the case here.

-Ryan