Prof. Michael Inggs of University of Cape Town

South Africa and UCT have been involved in Radar since 1939. In 1988 activity restarted with the setting up of the Radar Remote Sensing Group, after a gap of 50 years after the work relating to the Second World War. This talk will give a brief overview of sensors and data analysis relating to: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), with a unique VHF sensor. Lower frequency sensors for landmine and civil Engineering applications followed, together with applications of Satellite SAR to subsidence monitoring, and calibration of the Shuttle Imaging Radar. More recently the group has worked on Symbiotic radar for aircraft detection using FM Broadcast signals, as well as a number of radar networks i.e. multistatic sensors. A very low power S Band SAR for vehicle or small aircraft deployment is the most recent work.

Biography:

Michael Inggs was born and educated in the Eastern Cape, South Africa (Uitenhage and Grahamstown). He has an Honours degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Rhodes University (1973) and a PhD, DIC from Imperial College, London (1979). He has worked in industry in the UK, USA and South Africa, and joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cape Town in 1988, from where he retired in 2016 and now holds the rank of Emeritus Professor. He holds a Visiting Professorship at University College London, and was a visiting Professor at TU Delft in 2015. His research is in the area of radar sensor networks, radar remote sensing with SAR and high performance computing. He has more than 200 journal and conference publications, four patents, and has supervised more than 100 M.Sc. and 20 Ph.D. to completion. He is a Life Senior Member of the IEEE, was a member of the Administration Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society 2011-2016, as Director of Education, member IEEE AESS Radar Panel, and was the convenor of the taught masters M.Eng.(Radar) programme at UCT from inception in 2011 to 2015. In 2015 a paper in the IEEE AESS Magazine won the Harry Mimno award for the UCT team. He started the Radar Remote Sensing Group at UCT in 1988, and the team developed the SASAR VHF SAR system, especially the SAR Image processing, culminating in a collaboration with the CSIR. We carried out contract work for many major mining houses on the use of SAR for prospecting, as well as monitoring ground subsidence due to reservoir filling and mining activities, using spaceborne SAR. This latter work was sponsored by the Council for Geosciences and the Water Research Commission. We have just completed the development of a small SAR sensor for use with drones.

Address:Cape Town, Unknown, South Africa