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Alfonso Farina

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Alfonso Farina
Alfonso Farina during a conference in 2023
Born (1948-01-25) January 25, 1948 (age 76)
Petrella Salto Rieti, Italy
NationalityItalian
Alma materSapienza University of Rome
Known forRadar signal processing
Track while scan
ECCM
Radar clutter
AwardsFred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award (1987)
IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and Applications (2010)
IET Achievement Medals (2014)
IEEE AESS Pioneer Award (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsElectronic engineering
InstitutionsUniversity of Naples Federico II

Selenia
Alenia
AMS jv
Selex SI
Selex ES
Finmeccanica

Leonardo S.p.A.

Alfonso Farina FREng (born January 25, 1948) is an Italian electronic engineer and former industry manager. He is most noted for the development of the track while scan techniques for radars and generally for the development of a wide range of signal processing techniques used for sensors where tracking plays an essential role. He is author of about 1000 publications. His work was aimed to a synergistic cooperation between industry and academy.

Biography

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Alfonso Farina was born in Petrella Salto, a small town near Rieti in 1948. He obtained a doctoral – laurea - degree in electronic engineering on 1973 at University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1974 he joined Selenia, a Finmeccanica company then become Selex ES. Here he held the role of director of the analysis of integrate systems unit and then chief engineer of large business systems division. More recently, he has been the senior VP CTO of the company and then senior advisor to the CTO. From 1979 to 1985 he also was professor ("incaricato") of radar techniques at the University of Naples.

He retired in October 2014 but, currently, works as a consultant. [1]

Work

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The activity of Alfonso Farina spans a wide range of arguments in the area of radars and sensors. His pioneering work on track while scan, now widely used in all radars, was recounted in a classical set of two books[2] [3] that due to their widespread relevance have gone published also with Russian and Chinese translations. A more recent publication by him also accounts for ideas and applications on adaptive radar signal processing. [4]

Alfonso Farina (center) receives the IEEE M. Barry Carlton best paper award 2013 on 25 April 2018.

He has also been the contributor to the article on ECCM, invited by Merrill Skolnik, in the second edition of the Radar Handbook (Ch. 9)[5] and the third (Ch. 24) [6]

Together with Artenio Russo, he has generalised the well-known Swerling target fluctuation cases these being special cases.[7]

Together with Sergio Barbarossa, he introduced time-frequency distributions in the analysis of synthetic-aperture radar signals [8] The methods are useful, in particular, for the detection and imaging of objects moving on the Earth, observed from airborne or spaceborne synthetic aperture radars. The approach was later extended to multi-antenna systems, giving rise to space-time-frequency processing.[9]

He is considered the "father" of Italian industrial PCL radar. From 2004 to 2014, he led the team of engineers in conceiving, designing and implementing successive generations of improved PCL radar systems, extensively tested over several years.

Together with Hernandez and Ristic, he extended the theory and calculation of Posterior Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB) to the realistic case of detection probability less than 1 and probability of false alarm greater than 0, with practical applications to target tracking.[10]

Together with Luigi Chisci and Giorgio Battistelli he has developed target tracking for radar systems.[11]

In the recent decade, he has contributed to exploit his competence on signal processing in favor of cyber security of integrated systems. [12] [13] [14]

He has been the organizer and general chairman of 2008 IEEE-AESS Radar Conference[15] held in Rome. This was the first time that such conference has been held outside US since its inception on 1974.

Since 2017 till 2023 he is the Chair of Italy Section Chapter, IEEE AESS-10.

Since 2017 (three-year term), he has been in the Editorial Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

He is Visiting Professor at University College of London and Cranfield University in UK.

Since 2014, he works as a consultant.

Recently, he gave an interview for the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, with Fulvio Gini hosting, recounting of his professional achievements and more.[16]

In October 2018 he was interviewed at Rai Storia for the "70° anniversario di Leonardo Company" ("70th anniversary of Leonardo Company").[17]

He is active in research on quantum radar. Recently, he has been an associate editor of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine for a special issue on quantum radar, published in two parts, together with Marco Frasca and Bhashyam Balaji.[18] [19]

Currently, he is ranked in the list of 2% top scientists in the World.[20]

He is President of the Radar & Sensors Academy of Leonardo S.p.A. Electronic Division.

He is President of the Underwater and Sensor Systems Academy of Leonardo S.p.A. Electronic Division.

Awards and honors

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Farina is IEEE Fellow since 2000 and International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2005, the latter with the citation "Distinguished for outstanding and continuous innovative in the development of radar signal and data processing techniques and application of these findings in practical systems". He received the award from the hands of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. From 1997 he is Fellow of IET. Since 2010 he is also Fellow of EURASIP. Starting from 2020, he is fellow member of European Academy of Science.[21]

Since November 2020, he has been named "Académico Correspondiente de la Real Academia de Ingeniería de España".

He is in the Board of Governance of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (2022-2024).

He is part of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Standing Committee Chairs as responsible of “Member Service: HISTORY”.

He won the following awards:

For development of radar data processing techniques.
Peter Knott (left), director of the Fraunhofer Institute FHR, presents the Christian Hülsmeyer Award to Alfonso Farina (center). On the right Pierfrancesco Lombardo. (IRS 2019, June, Ulm (Germany))
For continuous, innovative, theoretical and practical contributions to radar systems and adaptive signal processing techniques.[22][23]
For outstanding contributions to radar system design, signal, data and image processing and data fusion.[24]
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society Industrial Leader Award, 2017 (presented on 2018), with the motivation
For contributions to radar array processing and industrial leadership.[25]
  • Honorary chair of IEEE RadarConf 2020, Florence.[26]
  • 2019 Christian Hülsmeyer Award from the German Institute of Navigation (DGON), with the motivation
In appreciation of his outstanding contribution to radar research and education.

For pioneering contributions to the analysis, design, development, and experimentation of digital-based adaptive radar systems.

  • 10 July 2024: he gave the gala dinner speech at the ISIF IEEE International conference on Fusion 2024, Venice, Italy

References

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  1. ^ "Alfonso Farina | IEEE AESS".
  2. ^ Alfonso Farina, Flavio Alessandro Studer (1985). Radar Data Processing. Vol. 1 – Introduction and Tracking. Research Studies Press. p. 325. ISBN 978-0863800269.
  3. ^ Alfonso Farina, Flavio Alessandro Studer (1986). Radar Data Processing. Vol. 2 – Advanced topics and applications. Research Studies Press. p. 362. ISBN 978-0863800382.
  4. ^ Alfonso Farina (1992). Antenna based signal processing techniques for radar systems. Artech House. p. 388. ISBN 978-0890063965.
  5. ^ Merrill Skolnik (1990). Radar Handbook. McGraw-Hill. p. 1200. ISBN 978-0070579132.
  6. ^ Merrill Skolnik (2008). Radar Handbook. McGraw-Hill. p. 1328. ISBN 978-0071485470.
  7. ^ Farina, A.; Russo, A. (September 1986). "Radar detection of correlated targets in clutter". IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. AES-22 (5): 513–532. Bibcode:1986ITAES..22..513F. doi:10.1109/TAES.1986.310717. S2CID 34700420.
  8. ^ Barbarossa, S.; Farina, A. (February 1992). "Detection and imaging of moving objects with synthetic aperture radar. 2. Joint time-frequency analysis by Wigner-Ville distribution". IEE Proceedings F - Radar and Signal Processing. 139 (1): 89–97. doi:10.1049/ip-f-2.1992.0011.
  9. ^ Barbarossa, S.; Farina, A. (April 1994). "Space-time-frequency processing of synthetic aperture radar signals". IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. AES-30 (2): 341–358. Bibcode:1994ITAES..30..341B. doi:10.1109/7.272259.
  10. ^ Hernandez, M.L.; Farina, A.; Ristic, B. (April 2006). "A PCRLB for tracking in cluttered environments: measurement sequence conditioning approach". IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. 42 (2): 680–704. Bibcode:2006ITAES..42..680H. doi:10.1109/TAES.2006.1642582. S2CID 38309196.
  11. ^ Farina, A.; Battistelli, G.; Chisci, L.; Di Lallo, A. (2017). "40 Years of tracking for radar systems: A cross-disciplinary academic and industrial viewpoint". 2017 International Conference on Control, Automation and Information Sciences (ICCAIS). pp. 1–8. doi:10.1109/ICCAIS.2017.8217557. ISBN 978-1-5386-3114-0. S2CID 3839030.
  12. ^ Matta, V.; di Mauro, M.; Longo, M.; Farina, A. (December 2018). "Cyber-Threat Mitigation Exploiting the Birth-Death-Immigration Model". IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security Issue. 13 (12): 3137–3152. doi:10.1109/TIFS.2018.2838084. S2CID 49272998.
  13. ^ Fantacci, C.; Farina, A.; Frasca, M. (2014). "Stochastic Filtering of Random Fibonacci Sequence: Theory and Applications". Signal Processing. 104: 212–224. Bibcode:2014SigPr.104..212F. doi:10.1016/j.sigpro.2014.03.052.
  14. ^ Fortunati, S.; Gini, F.; Greco, M.; Farina, A.; Graziano, A.; Giompapa, S. (April 2016). "An improvement of the state-of-the-art Covariance-based Methods for Statistical Anomaly Detection Algorithms". Signal, Image and Video Processing. 10 (4): 687–694. doi:10.1007/s11760-015-0796-y. S2CID 255376908.
  15. ^ "2008 IEEE Radar Conference". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved August 10, 2015.
  16. ^ Gini, Fulvio (June 2016). "AESS historical interview: A conversation with a friend: Alfonso Farina". IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine. 31 (6): 41–49. doi:10.1109/MAES.2016.160008. S2CID 40300351.
  17. ^ Three minute trailer in Italian.
  18. ^ Frasca, Marco; Farina, Alfonso; Bhashyam, Balaji (May 6, 2020). "Foreword to the Special Issue on Quantum Radar". IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine. 35 (4): 4–7. doi:10.1109/MAES.2020.2977851. S2CID 219115233.
  19. ^ Frasca, Marco; Farina, Alfonso; Bhashyam, Balaji (November 6, 2020). "Foreword to the Special Issue on Quantum Radar—Part 2". IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine. 35 (11): 4–7. doi:10.1109/MAES.2020.3022439. S2CID 228963086.
  20. ^ Baas, Jeroen; Boyack, Kevin; Ioannidis, John (October 8, 2020). "Data for "Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators"". Mendeley Data. V2. doi:10.17632/btchxktzyw.2.
  21. ^ European Academy of Science.
  22. ^ Recipients of the Dennis J. Picard Medal.
  23. ^ Dennis J. Picard Medal award ceremony.
  24. ^ "Recipients of the IET Awards - Achievement Medals". Archived from the original on December 17, 2014. Retrieved August 10, 2015.
  25. ^ Recipients of IEEE Signal Processing Society Awards and Fellowship.
  26. ^ IEEE RadarConf 2020


In June 2023 Alfonso has collected the list of titles his first 1000 scientific publications in a file that is freely available

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