Dr. David Bradley, the Munitions Response (MR) Program Manager, recently participated on the organizing committee for the 5^th Underwater Acoustics Conference & Exhibition (UACE2019) held from June 30^th through July 5^th, 2019. At UACE2019, researchers from all over the world gathered to exchange recent results and discuss future challenges in implementing and apply underwater acoustic technologies. Many topics were covered including unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection, classification and remediation; automatic target recognition, detection, classification and modeling; and marine sediment acoustics.

A number of SERDP Principal Investigators attended and presented at the conference. Dr. Steven Kargl discussed the Multi-Sensor Towbody (MuST) being developed at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboratory and the research that has led to the design of the prototype platform (Project Web Page). Dr. David Williams from NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation presented his research developing a novel detection and classification framework for UXO that exploits synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) data (Project Web Page). Dr. Michael Richardson, a technical advisor to the MR Technical Committee, organized a special session entitled “Underwater Unexploded Ordnance (UXO): Detections and Remediation” related to the interests of the MR program.

The conference comprised a prominent series of oral sessions with invited papers given by leading international scientists. In addition, most recent research results were presented in contributed papers, which included papers from Dr. Kargl and Dr. Williams.

All papers presented at the conference have been published in the proceedings which are available on the Underwater Acoustic Conference website.