Friday, February 12, 2021
6PM IST (India Standard Time)
7:30AM US Eastern time
Speaker: Dr. (Cdr.) Arnab Das, Founder & Director, Maritime Research Centre (MRC), Pune, India
Sponsored by GRSS Bangalore Section
GRSS Webinar: Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) Framework: A New Perspective for the Indian Ocean Region
The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) has shown significant strategic promise in the 21st century and India needs to really scale up its efforts to be seen as a strategic global player in the future. The Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) framework got substantial relevance post 9/11, globally, and post the 26/11, in India. However, the security-driven formulation that the MDA has reduced itself to, brings significant limitations to its growth and sustenance. The Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) framework as proposed by the Maritime Research Centre (MRC), challenges the conventional understanding of being the underwater appendage of the much talked about MDA formulation. It proposes UDA to be a far bigger concept that aims to integrate all the four stakeholders (namely the security apparatus, the blue economic entities, the environmental regulators & disaster management authorities, and the science & technology providers), to facilitate the pooling of resources and synergizing of efforts for ensuring safe, secure, sustainable growth for all in the region. The tropical littoral waters in the IOR, present very unique challenges in terms of physical, economic as well as political and we need to overcome all these challenges to ensure any meaningful growth. The Security And Growth for All in the Region (SAGAR) declaration by the Honourable Prime Minister is a very ambitious vision statement, however, it does require substantial capacity and capability building to overcome the legacy issues. The continental mindset needs to be replaced with massive maritime intent that needs efforts in policy, technology & innovation, and also human resource development.
The talk will present the Research Challenges and Opportunities in the UDA framework for the IOR and provide a detailed perspective on how the young researchers can contribute to this mega initiative by MRC. It’s a multi-disciplinary framework with aspects of underwater robotics, signal processing, modeling & simulations, data science, and more.
SPEAKER’S BIO:
Dr. (Cdr) Arnab Das is a researcher, maritime strategist, and entrepreneur. He is the Founder & Director of the Maritime Research Centre (MRC) which is working on a unique concept of Underwater Domain Awareness (UDA) as its main focus. He has also founded and runs a start-up, M/S NirDhwani Technology Pvt Ltd that provides consultancies and services for high-end maritime security solutions and marine conservation support. He has over 70 publications, two book chapters, and a book to his credit.
Arnab served in the Indian Navy for over two decades. He did his Masters and Ph.D. from IIT Delhi as a uniformed officer and undertook several R&D projects during his seven years R&D tenure at IIT Delhi. He was invited to Tokyo University as a visiting researcher for his work on Freshwater Dolphins and post his retirement from the Indian Navy, he worked at the Acoustic Research Lab in NUS Singapore.
