FROM THE
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
THREE MONTHS AND COUNTING:
Highlights of an Exceptional SubOptic 2019 Conference Ahead BY STUART BARNES
Stuart Barnes Programme Chair
F
irstly, Happy New Year. 2019 is another major year for the submarine industry and SubOptic in particular. As Chairman of the Programme Committee I have been working with the team to provide a memorable conference in New Orleans in April. In a departure from previous events we have injected some new elements to the programme in order to underpin two major themes - Diversity and Global Reach. Here are some of the highlights of the SubOptic 2019 programme: • First and most importantly, we have not altered the highly successful body of the conference content, the papers and posters. SubOptic is the only conference that offers broad, original and relevant technical content attracting contemporary inputs on topics ranging from legal and regulatory through marine to the highly scientific issues currently affecting our industry. We have created three parallel tracks throughout the conference to accommodate the unprecedented response, with more than 90 Oral Presentations and 45
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Posters. What is greatly encouraging is that there are more papers than ever from further afield globally and I have to thank our Regional Ambassadors for this as well as the marvellous Papers Committee. • We have reinforced our Masterclass content and for the first time ever we are able, thanks to our event organisers STF, to offer Continuing Education Units to attendees of these sessions. We would like to encourage our major supporters to consider sending some of their younger talent to the conference to experience the buzz of our industry and earn some CEU merits. • As a major departure from previous SubOptic conferences we have made significant space for Round Tables. The Round Table Topics
have been especially chosen with the hope that some of these will evolve into post Conference Working Groups, thus building the overall aim of our organisation to make SubOptic more and more relevant than just a 3 yearly gathering • And the SubOptic Association has already created two working groups. One on Open Cables (led by Elizabeth Rivera Hartling) and one on Professional Opportunities / Diversity / Inclusion (led by Amy Marks). Both these will be showcased on Monday in dedicated sessions for the working groups to present their work, foster debate and further the discussion. • We have two excellent Panel Discussions chaired by Ed McCormack and Keith Schofield. Ed has assem-