Engineering Project Leadership

Served as the Principal Investigator and Project Director on 40 projects, from US Government Agencies, US Industry, and Canada, exceeding $15,000,000. Served as the Co-Principal Investigator on 25 projects, from US Government Agencies, US Industry, and Australia, exceeding $7,000,000

RADAR
Through the Wall Radar Imaging: Headed and directed twelve-year research and development projects from Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, Army Research Lab, and Office of Naval Research on Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging, where I: a) Introduced new and robust imaging techniques without knowledge of exterior wall characteristics, b) Developed coherent and noncoherent imaging approaches from variable standoff distances, c) Achieved high imaging quality and desired resolution performance using minimum numbers of antennas at the transmit and receive, d) Exploited multipath for improved imaging, e) Developed subspace methods and high resolution imaging techniques for urban indoor targets, f) Developed a dual-frequency Doppler radar approach for target range estimation, g) Devised statistical bounds on linear and nonlinear motion parameter estimation and human gait signatures, h) Established state-of-the art 3-D data collection system with high resolution capabilities, i) Developed signature exploitation techniques for improved target detection.

Compressive Urban Radar: Introduced, under a three-year project from Office of Naval Research, the new area of compressive urban imaging and sensing under a where I: a) Solved key problems for urban radars operating with substantially reduced space-time-frequency data, b) Developed ghost imaging reduction techniques using incomplete data, c) Devised change detection imaging methods for moving target indication (MTI) using compressed observations; d) Developed algorithms for structured Bayesian compressive sensing for distributed targets; e) Realized efficient 1-bit imaging using block sparsity, f) Developed compressive sensing holographic imaging techniques of 3-D objects for security applications.

Indoor Radar Monitoring for Healthcare: Headed a two-year project from Comcast Corporation. and a five-year project for Qatar National Research Fund on indoor monitoring. I led the area of RF sensing of activities of daily living (ADL) and hand/arm gesture recognition. I was among the first to develop: a) Accurate fall detection techniques for assisted living using handcrafted features and automatic feature learning; b) Machine learning and signal processing techniques for recognition of abnormal gait due to neurological and physical health conditions; c) Transfer learning, sparse autoencoders, and generative adversarial networks to handle training radar data insufficiency; d) Data cube and tensor based approaches for enhanced ADL classifications; e) Efficient hand/arm gesture recognition using curve matching and time-series analysis.

Sparse Aperture Radar Design: Headed a seven-year project from the Office of Naval Research on co-prime sensor arrays where I contributed extensively to advances in sparse array design. Major accomplishments include: a) Development of the theory of optimum sparse array configurations for maximizing beamforming output signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio, b) Development of generalized coprime array configurations to increase the number of virtual sensors, thus enabling direction finding for a large number of targets or emitters, c) Development of multi-frequency approaches for increasing the number of estimated sources far beyond that achieved using narrowband receivers; d) Development of effective direction-finding methods using sparse aperture for resolving a mixture of coherent and uncorrelated targets; e) Development of sparse aperture sensing on moving platforms; f) Development of sparse aperture design techniques for wideband signals using sparse reconstruction methods.

Ground Penetrating Radar: Contributed, under a three-year project from the Army Research Lab, to forward looking ground penetrating radar (GPR) imaging where I: a) Developed multi-view tomographic approaches and coherence-factor-based clutter mitigation techniques for imaging of shallow-buried landmines using a forward-looking GPR; b) Devised both adaptive and nonadaptive variants of image-domain likelihood ratio test to significantly suppress vulnerability of the target responses to interference scattering arising from interface roughness, leading to reliable detection of buried landmines. systems.

Passive Radar: Performed significant research, under a three-year project from the Air Force Research Lab, in imaging using signals of opportunity, such as TV and FM radio signals, with radar receivers. I developed: a) Sparsity-based space-time adaptive processing techniques for airborne passive radar; b) Effective clutter suppression techniques with extremely few secondary data samples; c) Complex multitask Bayesian compressive sensing algorithms for computationally intensive multi-sensor multi-target tracking problems.

Over-the-Horizon Radar: Introduced, under a three-year project from the Air Force Research Lab, novel time-frequency analysis techniques to characterize the Doppler effect of micro-multipath signals for tracking altitude of maneuvering targets. Major technical accomplishments include: a) Development of time-frequency analysis methods to resolve sources with closely separated time-varying Doppler signatures; b) Development of robust time-frequency analysis methods for frequency modulated signals in the presence of random or burst missing samples.

Dual-Function Radar Communication Systems: Headed a five-year project from the National Science Foundation project on radio frequency (RF) co-existence. I was among the first to develop strategies for RF convergence, in which radar and communications systems employ the same bandwidth and a common aperture. I introduced a) Novel signaling schemes for embedding communication information into radar pulses and radar beams; b) Novel signaling techniques for communication symbol embedding using amplitude-, phase-, and code-shift keying methods and utilizing both waveform-diversity and spatial degrees of freedom; c) High data rate communications in MIMO and Frequency-Hopping radars platforms.

Satelite Navigation
Anti-jam GPS: Headed and directed a ten-year funded project from the Air Force Research Lab, a three-year funded project from the Office of Naval Research and a three-year funded project from the National Science Foundation, all on interference mitigation in wideband communication signal platforms and Anti-Jam GPS receivers, specifically I: a) Introduced novel techniques for interference suppression in GPS receivers using multi-antennas suitable for "cold start" in which no acquisition and knowledge of satellite positions are assumed; b) Solved FM interference suppression problems using various techniques, including time-varying notch filtering, subspace projections, spatio-temporal processing, spatial polarimetric processing, and signal synthesis from the time-frequency domain; c) Analyzed GPS receiver performance in the presence of non-Gaussian noise; d) Examined GPS receiver performance in multipath for outdoor and indoor operations; e) Applied interference cancelation techniques for next generation of GNSS receivers.

Ultrasound
Ultrasound Imaging: Headed a five-year project from the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation program where I contributed to advanced sensing using the acoustic and ultrasound modalities, specifically, in the areas of non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM). I applied subspace analysis and eigen-decomposition methods for enhanced ultrasound NDE imaging through reverberant layers. He was one of the first to apply sparse signal processing to detect flaws in material using lamb waves. I also led the work on exploitation of multipath within a structure to increase signal-to-noise and signal-to-clutter ratios, leading to improved defect detection and localization. I effectively applied similar concepts for multi-helical path exploitation in sparsity-based guided-wave imaging of defects in pipes. I successfully utilized multi-modal propagation together with specular multipath of acoustic waves for sparse reconstruction and detection of anomalies in materials.

Communications
Wireless and Satelite Communications: Headed a five-year project from the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation program on wireless communications. I contributed extensively to advances in cooperative diversity, space-time coding, spatial processing for frequency diversity systems, and subband array processing for frequency selective fading. In addition, I: (a) Assessed smart antenna technology for Comcast Wireless in 1995, and recommended the constant Modulus Algorithm as a viable technology for the AMPS wireless standards; b) Developed in 1999-2001, for the Sarnoff Corporation, a CMA-DD hybrid technique for fast time-varying channel equalization for application to High Definition TV and short-range wireless connectivity; c) Developed, for General Electric though a two-year research program 1989-1990, a combined high resolution adaptive nulling and localization for commercial and non-commercial satellites, where subspace methods were applied , to then analog adaptive loops, for multichannel multi-antenna satellite systems.

Rotorcraft
Rotorcrafts: Headed and directed a four-year project from the Boeing Rotorcraft Division on channel equalization and diversity techniques for rotorcrafts, specifically, I: a) Used MIMO for enhanced rotorcraft communication links with cyclic channel characteristics caused by the aircraft propeller rotations; b) Combated rotor signal inter-modulations using transmit diversity techniques and space-time coding, c) Applied blind source separations to airborne antenna.

Radio Frequency Identification
RFID: Contributed, under funding from State od Pennsylvania BFTP and the Office of Naval Research to RFID. I was among the first to: a) Introduce RFID tag localization and tracking techniques based on signal processing and direction-finding approaches; b) Develop multi-frequency based methods for effective range estimation of passive RFID tags.