Last Updated February 23, 2009

 

	Dr. Mark A. Richards Principal Research Engineer and Adjunct Professor School of Electrical & Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology	School of Electrical & Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology 266 Ferst Drive Atlanta, GA 30332-0765 Phone:   404-894-2714 Fax:        404-894-0560 E-mail:   mark.richards@ece.gatech.edu Office:    Klaus Advanced Computing Building                 (KACB), Room 3354             Direction to Klaus Building: ●   Transit and Driving Directions ●   Building and Parking (at TSRB Bldg.) map (pdf) ●   Local Hotel List (compiled by GT Distance Learning)   View from my office in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, looking East toward Midtown Atlanta and across the GT Baseball Stadium. Updated every 15 minutes.
Biographical Sketch: For a reasonably recent and mostly complete curriculum vitae, click here. If you actually look at that CV, you will find that I spent most of my career since finishing the Ph.D., namely the 20 years from 1982-2001, at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the applied R&D arm of Georgia Tech (with a few years at Lockheed-Martin and DARPA mixed in there). After teaching part-time and serving as an adjunct professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) on a regular basis for several years, I moved to ECE full time in 2002. You will also see that I got both my bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech ECE (the M.S. is from Stanford), so basically I am a Georgia Tech lifer. Some have suggested that I bear some resemblance to other, better-known persons.

You Should Study DSP So This Doesn’t Happen To You!

The author of PhD Comics, Jorge Cham, got his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in 1997.  This strip suggests he is a veteran (or survivor) of ECE2025.

More from PhD Comics:

 

Another good geek comic (I like comics): xkcd

 

What I Do:

Currently, I am involved in five major activities:

●      Writing educational and tutorial materials in the field of radar signal processing.

●      Directing and teaching in continuing education courses.

●      Teaching undergraduate and graduate ECE courses.

●      Conducting research related to high performance embedded computing (HPEC) and radar signal processing:

o    Most recently, I have supported DARPA’s exascale computing study (ECS) and the subsequent exascale computing software and resiliency studies (ECSS and ECRS) and, especially, the embedded extreme scale (EES) follow-on study, which is currently ongoing.  More information on the ECS report is available further down the page.

o    Another current area of HPEC research is the use of Graphical Processing units (GPUs) for more general embedded computing (so-called General Purpose GPU, or GPGPU, computing), especially in sensor signal processing.  A sample paper in this area is cited below.

o    Previously, DARPA’s Polymorphous Computing Architectures (PCA) program (now completed); for info see

•       The Georgia Tech PCA project site and

•       The Morphware Forum web site

o    Some ongoing projects that I helped start, but in which I am now less active (though GT is still involved), include

•       the High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative (HPEC-SI)

•       the Vector, Signal, and Image Processing (VSIPL) Forum

·         Recently, my colleagues Dan Campbell and Andrew Kerr released the first version of GPU VSIPL, an implementation of the VSIPL Core Lite profile that targets GPUs using Nvidia’s CUDA platform.  A paper on GPU-VSIPL is included below.

o    As for radar research, I am doing a little work on detection algorithms for the AN/TPQ-37 and AN/TPQ-37 FireFinder radars.

●      Research Development (i.e., marketing)

o    For the ECE School, especially with DoD sponsors, and

o    A focused effort promoting research at DARPA for all of Georgia Tech

•       Georgia Tech personnel can examine the GIT-DARPA web site.

I also do some consulting and “expert witness” work.  (Slightly) more on this below.

 

Recent Courses Taught:

Fall 2008:          ECE 6272, Fundamentals of Radar Signal Processing

ECE 6272, which is my “baby”, will next be offered in the Fall 2010 semester. Both on-campus and distance learning sections are available; see the Georgia Tech Distance Learning and Professional Education web site for information on distance learning options.  My book of the same title evolved from the class notes for this course and is now the course text.

Spring 2008:     ECE 4271, Applications of Digital Signal Processing

Spring 2007:     ECE 2025, Introduction to Signal Processing (recitation & lab sections)

 

Other Courses Taught:

ECE 4270, Fundamentals of Digital Signal Processing

 

Continuing Education:

I have been heavily involved in developing and teaching continuing education courses (short courses), mostly on defense-related topics, for some years. The three courses I have co-developed are:

Signal Processing Refresher. This is a general, sophomore-level review of basic signals and system concepts such as linear filters and Fourier analysis. It is a good way to “scrape the rust off” before tackling some of the other short courses listed next, if you haven’t worked in signal processing in a while.

Fundamentals of Radar Signal Processing
This is a good follow-on to Principles of Modern Radar (see below), and an excellent stepping stone for advanced radar signal processing short courses such as Fundamentals of Synthetic Aperture Radar Signal Processing and Space-Time Adaptive Processing: Applications to Radar.

Fundamentals of Synthetic Aperture Radar Signal Processing
This course offers fairly detailed coverage of the major 2D and 3D SAR image formation algorithms and SAR applications.

Most of these are taught once or twice a year in Atlanta and sometimes in other locations.  Check out the Georgia Tech Professional Education site, or the course-specific links above, for information on costs, locations, and dates.  All of these courses are available on a contract basis as well. Contact me for more information.

In addition, I teach in a number of other current Georgia Tech short courses, taught in Atlanta and various other cities, and available on a contract (and customized) basis as well:

●      Principles of Modern Radar
This is Georgia Tech’s “Radar 101” short course, attended by thousands of students from government and industry over the last 20 years.

●      Radar Waveforms: Properties, Analysis, Design, and Application

●      Principles of Continuous Wave (CW) Radar

●      Space-Based Radar

●      Space-Time Adaptive Processing: Applications to Radar

●      Fundamentals of Earth Remote Sensing

The complete list of defense-related Georgia Tech short courses (as well as many other subject areas) is available at the Distance Learning and Professional Education site. You can also find information on academic credit courses offered for distance learning at this site.

 

Fundamentals of Radar Signal Processing

Published by McGraw-Hill in 2005, this is a text I have written based on the Georgia Tech graduate course ECE 6272 of the same name, as well as the Continuing Education course, also of the same name. This link provides the Table of Contents and Preface, links to book purchase web sites, the errata sheet as it develops, supplemental notes on assorted topics, and information on a number of instructor resources for institutions adopting the book for a course.

 

 

A Beginners Guide to Interferometric SAR Concepts and Signal Processing

(Including color versions of images in the manuscript)

M. A. Richards, “A Beginners Guide to Interferometric SAR Concepts and Signal Processing,” IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Magazine, Tutorial Issue IV, vol. 22, no. 9, pt. 2, pp. 5-29, September 2007. This link leads to a pdf copy of the manuscript and color versions of selected images from the manuscript. The important features of these images are much more perceptible in color than in the grayscale versions in the manuscript.

 

Exascale Computing Study Report

Beginning in mid-2007, DARPA/IPTO has sponsored a series of studies intended to understand the future course of mainstream computing technology and determine whether or not it would allow a 1,000X increase in the computational capabilities of computing systems by the 2015 time frame. Where current technology trends were deemed incapable of achieving such increases, the study was also charged with identifying the major challenges and the areas where additional targeted research could lay the groundwork for overcoming them.  The publicly-released final report of the first exascale computing study is available here.

 

Essay on the Relative Contributions of Moore’s Law and Algorithms to Digital Signal Processing

M. A. Richards and G. A. Shaw, “Chips, Architectures and Algorithms: Reflections on the Exponential Growth of Digital Signal Processing Capability”. A portion of the ideas in this paper were published at the 2004 High Performance Embedded computing (HPEC) Workshop.

 

Recent Research Papers:

I don’t do a lot of papers, but here are a handful of relatively recent papers that are representative of my research activities:

A. R, Kerr, D. P. Campbell, and M. A. Richards, “QR Decomposition on GPUs”, Proceedings 2nd Workshop on General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU), Washington, DC, March 8, 2009.

A. R, Kerr, D. P. Campbell, and M. A. Richards, “GPU VSIPL: High-Performance VSIPL Implementation for GPUs”, Proceedings 2008 High Performance Embedded Computing Workshop, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, September 23-25, 2008. (This is just a presentation, not a paper.)

P. A. Karasev, D. P. Campbell, and M. A. Richards, “Obtaining a 35x Speedup in 2D Phase Unwrapping”, Proceedings 2007 IEEE Radar Conference, Waltham, MA, pp. 574-578, 17-20 April, 2007.

S. D. Fisher, M. A. Richards, and G. A. Showman, “An Inverse Polar Format Algorithm for Turntable Spotlight ISAR Imaging Systems Using Stepped Frequency Waveforms”, Proceedings 2004 IEEE Radar Conference, pp. 212-217, April, 2004.

M. A. Richards, “Coherent Integration Loss due to White Gaussian Phase Noise”, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, vol. 10, no. 7, pp. 208-210, July 2003.

M. A. Richards, D. P. Campbell, and K. M. Mackenzie, “Morphware Stable Interface: A Software Framework for Polymorphous Computing Architectures”, Digest of Papers, 2003 Government Microcircuits Applications Conference (GOMAC).

W. W. Bonifant, Jr., M. A. Richards, and J. H. McClellan, “Interferometric height estimation of the seafloor via synthetic aperture sonar in the presence of motion errors”, IEE Proceedings - Radar, Sonar, and Navigation, vol. 147, no.6, pp. 322-330, Dec. 2000. Based on Will Bonifant’s M.S. thesis at Georgia Tech, this paper was subsequently awarded the Clarke Griffiths Memorial Premium prize by IEE in July 2002.  A MATLAB simulation of 2D and 3D SAS is available below.

 

Book Chapters:

I have edited or contributed chapters to a few other books along the way:

M. A. Richards, A. J. Gadient, and G. A. Frank, editors, Rapid Prototyping of Application Specific Signal Processors, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997.  This book was a result of the DARPA Rapid Prototyping of Application-Specific Signal Processors (RASSP) program of the mid-1990s, for which I served as Program Manager during 1993-95.  There is still a RASSP archive site.

“Synthetic Aperture Processing” (Chapter 10) and “Doppler Processing” (Chapter 8) in G. V. Morris and L. L. Harkness, editors, Airborne Pulsed Doppler Radar, 2nd edition, Artech House, Norwood, Massachusetts, 1996.

“Nonlinear Effects in Fourier Transform Processing” (Chapter 6) and “Motion Compensation Fundamentals” (Chapter 7) in J. A. Scheer and J. L. Kurtz, editors, Coherent Radar Performance Estimation. Artech House, Norwood, Massachusetts, 1993.

“Signal Processor Architecture for Pulse Train Processors”, Section 11.7 in F. E. Nathanson, Radar Design Principles, 2nd edition. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991.

 

Consulting and Expert Witness

I occasionally consult in the areas of radar signal processing, high performance embedded computing, and digital signal processing.  Please contact me for more information or to discuss potential consulting activities.

In January 2008, I served for the first time as an expert witness in a patent litigation on the topics of radar technology generally, and radar imaging specifically.  That was interesting stuff!  Please contact me to discuss potential expert witness activities.

 

MATLAB Software:

Here are a couple of possibly useful sets of MATLAB M-files available for download. Each is a WinZip archive. The sonar simulation includes a README file and supporting documents; the detection calculator is reasonably self-explanatory based on the header comments in the M files and the two example driver M-files included.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS WITH NO EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF SUITABILITY FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATSOEVER. IT IS AVAILABLE FOR USE SUBJECT ONLY TO THE REQUIREMENT THAT ALL SOURCE CREDITS INCLUDED IN THE FILES BE RETAINED IN ALL COPIES AND DERIVATIVE WORKS.

Probability of Detection calculator for nonfluctuating and fluctuating (Swerling models 1-4) targets, based on Meyer and Mayer equations.

2D and 3D synthetic aperture sonar simulation developed by William W. Bonifant, Jr., as part of his M.S. thesis at Georgia Tech.

 

XSPICESoftware:

Problems with this page? Please contact:

mark.richards@ece.gatech.edu