Joseph R. Guerci
Biography
For over 30 years, Joseph R. Guerci has been responsible for the inception, research, development, execution, and transition of next-generation multidisciplinary radar technologies impacting government, industrial, and academic settings. Guerci made early and sustained contributions in the area of fully adaptive radar (FAR) during the late 1980s and early 1990s. FAR consists of both adaptive transmit and receive functions, in contrast to traditional adaptive radar for which adaptation takes place mainly in the receiver. In 2000, while a program manager with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Guerci began the KASSPER project (Knowledge-Aided Sensor Signal Processing and Expert Reasoning) in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). This was the first major project to develop a real-time, high-performance embedded computing architecture capable of implementing knowledge-aided and knowledge-based algorithms to greatly enhance adaptive radar performance in challenging environments. This multiyear project achieved significant milestones and was transitioned to major national radar systems. In applying knowledge-aided techniques to space-time adaptive processing (STAP), Guerci pioneered a powerful architecture that built upon advances in the field from AFRL and MIT Lincoln Laboratory to translate a largely academic exercise into a de facto standard requirement for every radar system. The performance benefits provided by knowledge-aided STAP enabled a 10-dB improvement in detection and a 50% reduction in false alarms. He has been one of the pioneers of waveform diversity (using various signals in both transmitter and receiver design for improving the overall performance amidst interference and noise) and was instrumental in establishing the Waveform Diversity Conference Series. His work in the area of cognitive radar has resulted in radar programs with the goal of making the radar fully adaptive to its environment by considering all available degrees of freedom on transmit and receive to maximize system performance.
An IEEE Fellow and recipient of the 2007 IEEE Warren D. White Award, Guerci is currently president and chief executive officer of Information Systems Laboratories, Inc., La Jolla, CA, USA.
