Professor Vikram Krishnamurthy of Cornell University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.

Modern radar systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and responsive to their environments. While this flexibility enhances performance, it also introduces a fundamental vulnerability: behavioral adaptation becomes observable. An adversary can exploit radar emissions, responses, and operational patterns to infer hidden states, tracking strategies, and intent. This talk presents a unifying perspective on radar interaction as an adversarial inference problem, grounded in statistical signal processing and inverse reinforcement learning. Instead of estimating a target, we shift the focus to inferring an adversarial radar, using inverse filtering and natural language processing techniques to reconstruct the radar's estimate of the target, its hidden beliefs, and its operational intent. We then address a fundamental question: how can one detect the presence of a cognitive radar and identify its underlying objectives? This motivates revealed preference theory from microeconomics and inverse reinforcement learning as principled tools for inferring radar intent from observed behavior. Finally, we reverse the perspective: how can a radar mask its sensing strategy from an adversary while preserving operational effectiveness? We discuss mechanisms including utility masking and information-theoretic approaches that degrade identifiability while preserving performance.

Biography:

Vikram Krishnamurthy (Fellow, IEEE) received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand, in 1988, and Ph.D. degree in mathematical systems theory from the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, in 1992.

From 2002 to 2016, he was a Professor and Canada Research Chair with the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is currently a Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. 

He is the author of the book titled Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

His research interests include statistical signal processing and stochastic control in social networks and adaptive sensing.

Dr. Krishnamurthy served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED TOPICS IN SIGNAL PROCESSING.

He was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Sweden, in 2013.

Address:Cornell University, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ithaca, New York, United States