Mengxue Hou received one of the three Best Poster Awards in the Student Poster Competition of the MTS/IEEE OCEANS Conference, the flagship international conference on Ocean Engineering and Technologies. This conference was held June 17-20, 2019 in Marseille, France. 

Hou is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). She was recognized out of approximately 100 international participants this year for having a high quality paper, professional poster, and an outstanding presentation. Hou is advised by ECE Professor Fumin Zhang, who leads the Georgia Tech Systems Research (GTSR) Lab. 

Hou received the award for her poster entitled “Flow Field Partition for Underwater Vehicle Path Planning." The poster presents a novel compressed representation of the spatial and temporal variation of the ocean flow field. The compressed flow map is demonstrated to significantly reduce the computational cost of path planning for underwater vehicles. 

The research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Integrated Ocean Observing System. Hou and her colleagues at the GTSR Lab develop autonomous missions for underwater gliders that sample the ocean in an optimal pattern, assimilating the vehicle estimated data into ocean models in real or near-real time, and predicting future conditions to facilitate path planning.