Kassas named Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Zak Kassas has been named a 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS).

The honor is given to eminent experts lead their fields in new technical developments that shape the global community. These experts specialize in fields of interest of their society and travel to various technical and regional groups to lecture at events. 

The AESS fields of interest include organization, systems engineering, design, development, integration, and operation of complex systems for space, air, ocean, or ground environments. These systems include those represented on the AESS technical panels: navigation, avionics, radar, cyber security, among other interests, including information fusion.

Kassas will deliver two lectures related to his research: "No GPS, No Problem: Exploiting Signals of Opportunity for Resilient and Accurate Autonomous Navigation in GPS-Denied Environments" and "Ad Astra: Navigation with Megaconstellation LEO Satellites."

Kassas is an internationally recognized expert of positioning, navigation and/or timing (PNT) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments by exploiting terrestrial and extraterrestrial signals of opportunity (SOPs). He made breakthrough contributions that proved signals of opportunity (SOP) could be exploited for sustained, high-accuracy, real-world PNT, achieving the highest levels of accuracy to date—submeter- and meter-level accuracy on aerial vehicles and ground vehicles, including navigation in GPS-jammed environments and on U.S. Air Force high-altitude aircraft.

He and his team were the first to develop a comprehensive approach to extract accurate PNT information from 4G and 5G signals and a simultaneous tracking and navigation framework to exploit low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite signals. They developed a revolutionary framework for SOPs with unknown signal structure, termed cognitive opportunistic navigation, leading to the first published results of exploiting unknown Starlink LEO signals for PNT.

Kassas is currently the director of the Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal Assured Navigation (CARMEN), a U.S. Department of Transportation University Transportation Center led by The Ohio State University, which investigates PNT resiliency and accuracy of highly automated transportation systems.

Kassas has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, nine magazine articles, three invited book chapters and holds 19 U.S. patents. His numerous awards include the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program, Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program, National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, ION Thurlow Award, ION Burka Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Walter Fried Award and IEEE Signal Processing Society grand prize.

Article adapted from Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, March 21, 2023