IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - April 2021 - 63

Grifﬁths et al.
matter what was going on in his life, his primary interest
was who he was talking to. 'How are you doing? What
can I do for you? I always pray for you.' Mike always
made people feel like they were the most important person
in the room. " He had a mischievous sense of humor and
always a warm smile.
In the course of his career, he received several IEEE
Honors and Awards:
IEEE Fred Nathanson Memorial Award for Young
Engineer of the Year, 1998
IEEE Fellow " For Contributions to Adaptive Airborne
Signal Processing, " 1998
IEEE Warren D. White Award for Excellence in Radar
Engineering, 2009
IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for Radar Technologies and
Applications " For Leadership and Developments in
Fully Adaptive Radar, Advanced Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP), Knowledge-Based Signal
Processing and Waveform Diversity, " 2013
He served as the Chair of the IEEE AES Radar
Systems Panel, and twice as a member of the AES Board
of Governors. He brought to those roles the same dedication and commitment that characterized his research.
Mike had a deep Catholic faith, and was a parishioner
of St. Mary of Mt. Carmel/Blessed Sacrament Parish in
Utica where he was an Altar Server, Reader, Building
Committee member, Eucharistic Minister, and volunteer
at the annual church bazaars.
He served as mentor for many young engineers who
joined AFRL Rome Labs, and who have now moved on to
senior positions in government and in academia, in the
U.S. and other countries. That is perhaps his greatest
legacy-a substantial group of radar engineers worldwide
who owe so much to Mike and are proud to have called
him their mentor and friend.

KNOWLEDGE-BASED SIGNAL PROCESSING
Knowledge-based expert systems (KBS) lie in the realm
of artificial intelligence. KBS consists of a knowledge
base containing information specific to a problem domain
and an inference engine that employs reasoning to yield
decisions. KBSs have been built: some are very complex
with thousands of rules while others, relatively simple, are
designed to tackle very specialised tasks. Early in 2000, a
new breakthrough in the state of the art was represented
by KBS applied to radar processing and detection
algorithms, i.e., those based on a priori knowledge (geographic map, digital terrain model, geographic information systems, etc.) on the surveillance scene. Mike
conceived, led, and promoted KBS in radar systems, at
signal processing and data processing levels. He coauthored and promoted several publications in IEEE [1] and
APRIL 2021

IET journals, special issues, and books. Mike promoted
the NATO SET-063 Lecture Series on KBS. The objective
was to present a state-of-the-art assessment of knowledgebased radar signal and data processing techniques, and
thereby increase awareness of their value to the NATO
scientific community. Current developments in the area
were reviewed and examples of improved radar performance for augmented and upgraded systems were presented. In addition, the impact of KB technology on future
systems was discussed. The NATO Lecture Series SET063 were held in eight countries between 2003 and 2006.
They were a unique opportunity to share knowledge
across colleagues of NATO Countries and to reinforce
friendship.

WAVEFORM DIVERSITY
The speed and flexibility of modern digital signal processing means that it is now possible to generate precise,
wide-bandwidth radar waveforms, and to vary them,
potentially on a pulse-by-pulse basis. As examples, the
waveforms may be designed to have ultralow range sidelobes, high spectral purity or to classify or to discriminate
different targets, or they may include embedded communications functions. This opens up a whole range of possibilities in high-performance adaptive radar and is the
foundation of the subject of waveform diversity. Mike
assembled and led an international group of lecturers who
delivered a NATO Lecture Series (SET-119) on this subject over the years 2008-2010 in 12 different countries.
He also initiated the Waveform Diversity and Design conference series, and encouraged the publication of results
in edited books and in special sessions at conferences.

SENSORS AS ROBOTS
In a paper that he presented at the 2003 IEEE Radar
Conference in Adelaide, Australia [2], Mike put forward a
vision for an intelligent, adaptive network of sensors,
working in a collaborative manner. He used the example
of a troop of Scouts cleaning up the local park to illustrate
this. Such a system is inherently robust and flexible, and
can reconfigure itself as the nature of the mission evolves
and possibly as a node fails or otherwise becomes unusable. There are many issues to be solved before such systems can become reality, including Position, Navigation,
and Timing (PNT) so that the exact location of each node
is known and there is a common timing and phase reference, communication between the nodes of the network,
and the intelligent management of the network. Nevertheless, the paper and presentation point the way ahead to
intelligent networks of sensors, in contrast to the inflexible, monolithic, single-platform monostatic sensors of
the past.

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IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - April 2021

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