Speaker: Dr. Ramin Sabry, Senior Scientist, Defence R&D Canada
ABSTRACT: Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems form the backbone of any monitoring, defence and security operation. These systems (ground, sea, air or space-based) provide enhanced situational awareness to the decision makers at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Traditional surveillance systems operate within one environment and at one level. Current defence requirements and technological advances have evolved to multi-domain, multi-level sensor systems. For example, Space-Based System (SBS) technology has been advancing rapidly in terms of capability, affordability, size and reliability. Similar to the commercial sector, defence institutions are looking to improve their space capabilities by increasing the number of smaller, more affordable and more capable satellites that are being put into service. Given the complexity this introduces, one of the current challenges in this area is to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of a given collection of surveillance systems (i.e., ISR architecture) to the military decision maker. This effectiveness can only be assessed by taking into account a multitude of factors, from geospatial and temporal to information and fusion, all of which combine to describe the utility of a given architecture.
Space-based and Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) represent important assets and capabilities for situational awareness. This underscores the importance of effective and multi-layer data exploitation for monitoring (e.g., environmental) and Geospatial applications. An overview of the related research activities within Space ISR Applications (SIA) section at DRDC Ottawa is provided.
About the Speaker: Ramin Sabry (S’90-M’96-SM’06) received M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1991 and 1996 respectively. From 1996 to 2002 he was with Ericsson Communications where he conducted research on various aspects of wireless communications, RF components, systems, and radio propagation. He has held an adjunct faculty position with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Waterloo. In 2003 he joined Defence R&D Canada – Ottawa where he is currently a senior scientist and leading ISR Data Exploitation Group. His current research interests are in the area of electromagnetics, radio propagation, scattering, and polarimetric radar/SAR data exploitations.