John Fawcett was born in Victoria, Canada.
He received a B.Sc in Physics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Victoria in 1979 and a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1983.
He was with the Ocean Acoustics Group at D.R.E.P, Canada from 1984-1994. From 1994-1998, he worked at the NATO Undersea Research Centre, La Spezia, Italy and from 1998 until the present he has been at Defence R&D Canada – Atlantic,Halifax, Canada working in the areas of sonar data processing and target scattering.He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.

Rodolphe Devillers is Associate Professor in Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, where he leads the Marine Geomatics Research Group (www.marinegis.com), an interdisciplinary team exploring a number of research questions related to the use of GIS and spatial analysis for improving our understanding of the marine environment. Some of his more applied research uses acoustic technologies (e.g. single beam, multibeam) for seabed mapping and benthic habitat mapping, studies deep-sea corals ecology in Eastern Canada using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and analyses spatial and temporal changes in fisheries in relation to environmental changes. More theoretical research includes testing spatial statistical approaches for marine environmental modelling, the development of 3D marine data structures and the improvement of geovisualization tools for supporting maritime decision-making.

Dr. Michael Benjamin is a research scientist and lecturer at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Until 2010, he was a scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport Rhode Island. He received his B.Sc in Computer Science from Rensselaer and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Brown University. Dr. Benjamin’s work is focused on algorithms and software for autonomous marine vehicles. In 2007 he founded moos-ivp.org at MIT,hosting the MOOS-IvP open source project in marine autonomy software. A key part of this project is the use of a behavior based architecture for autonomous decision-making using multi-objective optimization with interval programming for reconciling competing behaviors. This work is driven by the belief that multi-objective optimization is a fundamental component of robust decision-making. Formulating a decision-making problem into distinct specialized components also promotes the collaborative development of an autonomous system with contributions from varied developers and organizations.

Rodolphe DEVILLERS

Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Michael BENJAMIN

Massachusetts Institute of Technology