Keynote Speaker - René Garello

KEYNOTE

René Garello

Professor Emeritus at IMT Atlantique, Life Fellow IEEE

The impact of human activities on the ocean and on humanity is constantly increasing. Achieving climate resilience centers on both climate change mitigation and adaptation. A sustainable future of the oceans, seas and coasts is paramount for humankind. The IEEE and the Oceanic Engineering Society is at the crossroads of the technologies for global observations, integrated ocean observing systems, data management systems, and appropriate models leading to services. The focus will be on pollution – loss of biodiversity, health impacts, microplastics, etc. - and resource depletion, and how IEEE can propose clean-tech solutions to the community.

The presentation will outline the need for more integration of measurements and sensors diversity. The collection of data, and their availability will be discussed. In particular a strong emphasis will be put on data quality assessment, processing and use of AI derived methodologies.

René Garello was born in 1953. He received the Ph.D. degree in Signal Processing at the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG) in 1981. From 1982 to 1984 he worked as a Research Associate at Aeronomy Lab, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado (USA). He joined the Institut Mines-Telecom Atlantique (IMT Atlantique, formerly Telecom Bretagne), Brest, France in 1985. In 1988, he became Professor in this engineering school in the field of signal processing and image processing and in 1995, Prof. Garello obtained his Habilitation (HDR; Habilitation to Supervise Research). Prof. Garello retired in Sept. 2021 with the status of Professor Emeritus.
His main research interests lie in Remote Sensing, 2D signal processing, statistical and spectral analysis applied to ocean surface features detection and characterization. For the last two decades, he has worked in the development of signal and image processing tools for the interpretation of radar signals and the extraction of sea surface features, either natural (wind, waves, currents) or manmade (ships, pollution). These application fields were supported by several European projects and industrial contracts. He is presently engaged in several initiatives on the topic of Marine Debris and Plastic in the oceans, sustainable developments and ocean best practices systems. Prof. Garello has authored or co-authored more than 60 papers, a hundred and thirty conference communications and three books. He had supervised more than 30 PhD students. For all his works, Prof. Garello was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE, class of 2006, “for contributions to signal processing applied to remote sensing of the ocean”. In 2021, he received the Distinguished Technical Achievement Award from IEEE OES "for signal and image processing of remotely sensed measurements of the ocean and connecting to physical oceanography solutions". At IMT Atlantique, Prof. Garello was the head of the research team TOMS (Traitement, Observation et Méthodes Statistiques – Processing, Observations and Statistical Methods) within the CNRS unit Lab-STICC before creating the ICTO (Information & Communication Technologies for Oceans) program. He was the director of the Scientific Interest Group Bretagne Télédétection (Brittany Remote Sensing) and leader of the project VIGISAT, a satellite radar receiving ground station for which he obtained twice a multi-million € grant (2009-2014; 2015-2020).
Prof. Garello was an elected IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society AdCom member from 1999 to 2001, from 2003 to 2005 and in 2005 for a new three-year term. In 2005, he was elected Vice-President Conference Operations and then re-elected in 2006 and 2008. In the beginning of 2001, he headed the Committee for defining a new set of Conference Policies and Procedures in order to insure continuity between successive OCEANS conferences. This committee (called JOAB – Joint OCEANS Administrative Board) defined several new approaches and came up with the concept of two Oceans-a-year (every year in Northern America, every other odd year in Europe and every other even year in Asia-Pacific).
Prof. Garello was the General Chairman of the first OCEANS of the new Two-Oceans-a-year concept: OCEANS’05 held in Brest, France in June 2005. He received the OES Distinguished Service Award (DSA) in 2006 for developing and implementing the two OCEANS conference policy. In 2012, Prof. René Garello was elected President of the IEEE OES for a two-year term and re-elected by acclamation in 2014. He was from 2017 to 2019 the chair of the IEEE Environmental Engineering Initiative, and has been for the same period seating as principal for IEEE at the GEO (Group on Earth Observation) Executive Committee.
Prof. Garello was an elected TAB member of the IEEE Conferences Committee (2015-2016), 2017 Member of the TAB Re-Connect Ad Hoc Committee. He was appointed as a member of the IEEE TAB Strategic Planning Committee from 2017 to 2019. Prof. René Garello is presently President of the IEEE France Section, elected for the period 2023-2025.He co-chaired the OBPS (Ocean Best Practices System) Steering Committee, a UNESCO/IOC supported project for the period 2023-2024.
He is the chair of the IEEE Region 8 ad hoc Committee on Climate change for the period 2025-2026.
He will be the General Chair of the IEEE OCEANS 2025 conference to be held in Brest in June 2025.