Trip Report
SSC'03 
Tokyo University
June 25-27 2003

The conference was fairly well attended by about 150 people or so. All sessions ran serially; everyone was able to hear all of the papers presented. The complete proceedings are avaiable on CD ROM or hardcopy.

Who Attended:

About 40% of the attendees were from the U.S.; these were fairly evenly divided between research institutions (MBARI, WHOI, Rutgers, U of Washington...), national research programs (JOI, IOOS...), and commercial entities (Nautronix)

About 50% of the attendees were from Japan, representing primarily research institutions and government agencies

There were also a number of attendees from Canada (U of Victoria) and Europe

Session Topics (Number of Papers) :
 - Previous Systems (7)
 - Observation Technology (10)
 - Scientific Results (11)
 - AUV/ROV Technology (8)
 - Communication Technology (6)
 - Future Systems (18)
 - Data and Interface Standardization (4)
 - Power Supply Technology (3)

Response to our paper:

 - Richard Dewey and Andy Maffei thought it unreasonable that metadata could not  be read from the puck at any time without power cycling the instrument. They were both interested and generally positive about our development effort; we should stay in touch with them.

 - Someone asked about the extent of our (mechanical shock) environmental testing

General Impressions:

 - There were an awful lot of slides of ocean observatory (OO) concepts that look a lot like NEPTUNE; Everyone (U.S., Japan, Canada, Europe) has something in the works. From what I have seen, Japan and MBARI are ahead in the development efforts. Rutgers seems to have done quite a bit in terms of having made use of existing telecom cables on their LEO observatory. U of Victoria seems very focused and organized in the development of VENUS (They expect to have parts of it operational in the next 2 years).

 - The OO focus in Japan is on seismic monitoring and tsunami warning.

 - All of the OO concepts I saw involve cable to shore networks like MARS/NEPTUNE. MOOS stands out in this regard.

 - Surprisingly, the details of data/metadata management are fairly murky in all of the system concepts presented. It seems like one of the prime movers of OO's is the archiving and distribution of huge amounts of data. This technology is fairly independent of the data collection systems -- this area seems to lag platforms development.

 - The Japanese presented a couple of papers about using XML, but these were fairly lightweight applications.

 - There is an open opportunity for MBARI to take the lead on data management technology.

 - There was a nice poster/paper on an AUV docking system developed by Kawasaki


Special Activities:
  AUV Lab Tour: 
  Got a brief tour of the AUV lab and machine shop at Tokyo University. It's a very nice new facility with a small 8 m test tank and a nicely appointed machine shop. Several AUVs were on display -- they have developed a really wide range of AUV designs.

Selected Papers:
 - Andy Maffei on developing data standards

Contacts:
Andrew Maffei (WHOI)
Richard Dewey (U of Victoria)
Peter Yinger (Nautronix)
Alan Chave (WHOI)