IEEE Volunteers are dedicated to a variety of engineering outreach initiatives. Many participate in outreach programs specifically aimed at supporting STEM initiatives for pre-university students. Hari Vishnu is the current chair of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, Singapore. He was selected as a presenter during the 2022 STEM Summit Societies’ Panel Discussion, where he and other IEEE Society leaders spoke about their experiences and motivation for STEM outreach at the pre-university level. This discussion and all STEM summit presentations are all available on demand here.

Vishnu is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Acoustic Research Laboratory at the National University of Singapore and is working on underwater acoustic signal processing and machine learning. His interests include machine learning for underwater applications, bio-acoustics and signal processing in impulsive noise. His involvement in STEM outreach began when he served on the IEEE Student Branch at NIT Calicut as Public relations officer and Secretary. During this period, he was instrumental in helping give birth to robotics initiatives at NITC, and also in conducting the popular FOSS open source software meet at NITC. He continued to be involved with STEM outreach into his career. IEEE OES was one of the first societies to collaborate with TryEngineering, where Vishnu and OES were the featured webinar for the inaugural edition of TryEngineering Tuesday: Ocean Engineering. You can watch the replay of the webinar on demand here. Now, Vishnu and the OES are helping to bring STEM initiatives such as robotics competitions to pre-university students. 

“One [aspect of STEM learning that] we focus on most is this hands-on learning aspect,” stated Vishnu when asked about the OES involvement in pre-university STEM outreach initiatives during the STEM Summit Societies’ Panel Discussion. He explained that these hands-on learning experiences were a big part of the underwater robotics competitions that they do around the world in the US, Australia, Europe, and Singapore. Vishnu has personally been involved in organizing and leading the Singapore competitions for much of his professional career. 

“We feel that this is one of our more rewarding and more impactful activities,” Vishnu commented about the success of the underwater robotics competitions. He explained that the 2022 Singapore competition not only recruited an impressive 25 teams and 200+ students, but it was also endorsed by the United Nations as part of a larger initiative called the Ocean Decade.

When asked during the summit why OES believes that pre-university STEM outreach is important, Vishnu explained that for ocean-related engineering, there is still so much unknown about the ocean worldwide for humanity to explore. 

“There is this growing understanding among the global ocean community that students and humanity as a whole need to connect more with the ocean,” Vishnu explained. He feels strongly that helping students understand just how connected our daily lives are to the oceans can help them understand the impact a career in ocean engineering can have.

“Let [the students] know that every aspect of their life is determined by the ocean in some way or another, every climate on every part of the earth, for example, is determined by the ocean somehow. There are a lot of career paths that they can go into where they are not aware of.”

When asked how he would measure success in STEM outreach, Vishnu explained that, like many other STEM outreach advocates, he feels that long-term impact is key, which makes determining short-term markers more challenging. Until long-term impact can be determined, keeping track of and metrics on students they’ve interacted with has been their main source of evaluation.

“We do stay in touch with many of those students [who participated in OES robotics competitions] over a long period of time and see how many of them go on to actually take up engineering in their university and oceanic engineering and ocean robotics related courses in their masters, and it turns out that number is actually quite impressive,” Vishnu explained, despite the lack of undergraduate courses and programs that are available for students in this topic. He’s even been able to track a few students who have successfully pursued their own start-ups in this area. Some of the metrics they look at specifically include the number of teams that participate in their programs, the geographical and gender diversity, and the number of participants who go on to be volunteers.

During the summit, Vishnu was also asked specifically about any positive outcomes he felt were a result of the OES engagement with TryEngineering Tuesday.

“It was the first TryEngineering Tuesday resource page that was launched,” Vishnu proudly stated. “It was on oceanic engineering and we were very happy and very honored to be a part of it.” He continued to explain that the panelists leading the TryEngineering Tuesday provided needed career advice such as how to get into the field and what topics to explore. He was pleased to see how many students asked questions at the end of that event. 

“I count that as a positive experience because if you have an engaged audience, that’s a good sign, right?!”

Vishnu obtained his Ph.D degree from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in Computer Engineering. He did his B.Tech in EEE from National Institute of Technology, Calicut, in 2008. His Ph.D involved the development of algorithms for underwater signal processing. These included detection & localization, acoustic propagation modeling, vector sensor processing, and robust methods in impulsive noise. He is the Chief Editor on the OES Science outreach magazine Earthzine and serves on the IEEE Oceanic Engineering society Administrative committee. In 2019, he was awarded the IEEE OES YP-BOOST award which aims to encourage young professionals to participate in the leadership of the society by participating in its working committees, and helping with aspects of IEEE OCEANS conferences. He is helping with OES early-career efforts on the UN Decade of Ocean Sciences. In 2022, Hari was featured on the UN Ocean Decade Early-career ocean professionals “conversations” series. He was one of the speakers at the whirlwind virtual world ‘research tour’ of the One Ocean Summit. You can view his full profile here