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The Radionavigation Laboratory congratulates Zaher (Zak) Kassas for being elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2011. To be eligible for IEEE Senior Member status, an IEEE Member must: have experience reflecting professional maturity; have been in professional practice for at least ten years; and show significant performance over a period of at least five of their years in professional practice. Zak Kassas is co-advised by Dr. Ari Araposthathis and Dr. Todd Humphreys.

Greg Allen received a 2011 Excellence Award from Applied Research Laboratories: The University of Texas at Austin. This award is given 'for outstanding research recognized by his fellow employees'. Greg is a senior staff member at ARL and has contributed to the design, development, testing, and deployment of a number of high-frequency sonar systems on U.S. Navy platforms. His at-sea testing experience includes a 1993 arctic submarine deployment and surfacing at the North Pole. Greg completed his PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Professor Brian Evans.

This free one-day event at the British National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (London) on Wednesday, February 22 will present results of current jamming detection, and consider emerging threats such as meaconing and spoofing. The seminar runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Interested participants must pre-register online.

The Radionavigation Laboratory congratulates WNCG student Ken Pesyna for being selected to receive the Innovative Signals Analysis Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The fellowship comes with a $4,000 stipend. In addition to being a member of the Radionavigation Laboratory, Ken is a member of the Wireless Systems Innovation Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Robert Heath.

Profs. Bank and Vishwanath have been collaborating, together with PhD students Kumar Appaiah and Sagi Zisman, on using signal processing driven by wireless (such as MIMO OFDM) over optical fiber to improve both data rates and distances. Specifically, this technology enables a 15x improvement in performance of multi-mode fiber, and promises linear capacity gains similar to those in wireless systems over multimode fiber. The NSF has recognized the impact of this research with a grant providing seed funding for the development of a demo-board that showcases the gains from optical MIMO technology.

What's the predictable endpoint of the trend toward ever cheaper, ever smaller, and ever more sensitive GPS? It's the GPS dot: a GPS tracking device first featured in the movie 'The Da Vinci code' and now moving inexorably from fiction to non-fiction. The GPS dot will fundamentally re-order our lives. We'll buy dots in bulk and stick them on everything we own worth more than a few tens of dollars.But there is a dark side to the dot. Did you know that it's not illegal to track your family, your friends, or even your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend with a GPS dot?

T.J. Brudner received the 2011 Jeffress Award from Applied Research Laboratories: The University of Texas at Austin. This is ARL's most prestigious award, 'In Recognition of Outstanding Contributions in Applied Research', and T.J. is the youngest ever to receive this award. As part of ARL's submarine sonar development effort, T.J. has served as the lead of the High Frequency Working Group under the Advanced Processing Build process. At the request of the U.S. Submarine Force, T.J. has taught high frequency submarine sonar in the Navy's Prospective Commanding Officers Submarine Command Course.

Prof. Vishwanath, together with Prof. Srinivasan at Ohio State University, has received a grant for the development of the theory and implementation of full duplex radios from the Department of Defense. Profs Vishwanath and Srinivasan plan to demonstrate architectures for MIMO full duplex radios as well as develop secure communication protocols using full duplex communication.

Prof. David Pan, Prof. Joydeep Ghosh and graduate students Duo Ding and Bei Yu have received the 2012 ASP-DAC Best Paper Award for their paper 'EPIC: Efficient Prediction of IC Manufacturing Hotspots With A Unified Meta-Classification Formulation.' ASP-DAC is one of the premier conferences for Electronic Design Automation. ASP-DAC 2012 is the seventeenth annual international conference on VLSI design automation in Asia and South Pacific region, one of the most active regions of design and fabrication of silicon chips in the world.

by kyle wesson Over the past decade, GPS security researchers have repeatedly warned that civil GPS is insecure and that users trust its signals at their peril. Disruption created by intentional generation of fake GPS signals, a type of attack against GPS receivers known as a spoofing attack, could have serious economic consequences. The deepening dependence of the civil infrastructure on GPS---especially for timing and synchronization---and the potential for financial gain or high-profile mischief make civil GPS spoofing a gathering threat.