Moeness Amin Awarded Best Paper in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Dr. Moeness Amin, director of Villanova University’s Center for Advanced Communications,  continues his decade-long tradition of averaging at least one best paper award each year. His 2014 paper, published in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (TAES), has been selected to receive the AES Society M. Barry Carlton Award. “Multipath Exploitation in Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging Using Sparse Reconstruction” is co-authored by Dr. Amin, Drs. Michael Leigsnering and Abdelhak Zoubir of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, and Dr. Fauzia Ahmad of Temple University. The award will be presented to Dr. Amin and his colleagues at the IEEE Radar Conference in Boston in May 2019.

Through-the-wall radar imaging has a number of civil, defense and security applications. Dr. Amin has led research in urban radar from the start, and since 2002, has been the world authority in this important technology area. TAES Editor-in-Chief Michael Rice lauded the authors for using multipath propagation modeling to model the high degree of clutter that is an evitable element of indoor radar imaging, and for their sparse techniques to address the complexity of the signal processing. He describes the paper as “mature and very well-written.”

Nominated by the AES publications team, the paper was endorsed by Drs. Pierfrancesco Lombardo and Francesco Soldovieri. Dr. Lombardo was impressed by the inclusion of both theory and application to real data and concluded that the paper is “innovative and complete at the same time.” Dr. Soldovieri observed, “The paper is a milestone in setting up effective strategies able to improve [a compressed sensing] approach by accounting for multipath exploitation and clutter mitigation.”

In the past two years, Dr. Amin received the EURASIP Best Paper Award for “Missing Samples Analysis in Signals for Applications to L-estimation and Compressive Sensing,” which appeared in Signal Processing, and the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine’s Harry Rowe Mimno Award for “Signaling Strategies for Dual-Function Radar Communications: An Overview.”

Dr. Bijan Mobasseri, professor and chair of Villanova’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, applauds Dr. Amin’s accomplishments: “The quantity and the quality of the scholarship coming out of the CAC over the past two decades—including three IEEE Fellows and numerous national and international awards—is nothing short of amazing.”