This conference features Prof. Margaret Cheney of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as the distinguished lecturer who will deliver ten lectures in the field of inverse scattering for radar imaging. The basic idea behind radar imaging is to illuminate a target with pulses of electromagnetic waves; the reflected waves are recorded and analyzed in order to make an image of the target or to determine its properties.
The field of radar imaging has been developed, during the last fifty years, entirely within the engineering community. Fifty years ago many of the challenges were engineering ones: It was difficult to design equipment to transmit microwaves at the high powers necessary and to detect the very faint returning signals. These hardware problems, however, have generally been overcome, and the remaining challenges in the field are mainly mathematical: What waveforms should we transmit? Where should we position the antennas to obtain the information we want? How should we process the data to make high-resolution images? How can we detect and remove artifacts? Can we form images of targets hidden by foliage? Can we determine the material properties of a target? Any significant future progress in the field is possible only if such problems are analyzed mathematically, and it is essential for mathematicians to understand the basic problems in this field and to contribute to the field.
The conference will bring all the major ideas and results in the field, provide a deeper understanding of the main open problems, and outline current directions in the field. The participants will include both established researchers and interested qualified newcomers, and special efforts will be made to include postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and traditionally underrepresented groups. The conference will allow participants to interact with each other and also with the principal lecturer, will promote interdisciplinary work and collaborations, will stimulate the regional research activity in an atmosphere conducive to establishing long term collaborations, and will also provide an interdisciplinary environment where mathematicians and researchers from other areas interact
