Speaker: Associate Professor Morris Cohen, Georgia Tech ECE

Title: The story of how low frequency radio signals connect space, underground, and everything in between.

Abstract: For decades, radio enthusiasts have tuned to their receivers to low frequencies, 500 Hz – 500 kHz. Since these frequencies are guided around the globe by reflections from the ground and ionosphere, observers can listen to lightning from thousands of miles away, or to naturally-generated signals in the Earth’s surrounding space environment. As such, low frequency waves are used for remote sensing of a host of geophysical phenomena. On the application side, low frequency waves are used for global navigation, to image inside metal boxes, to communicate underwater and across oceans, to improve meteorological forecasting, and to secure the power grid, among others. Advanced study in this field requires a unique combination of RF electromagnetic and plasma physics, signal processing, and RF engineering. In this talk, we will detail some of the uses of low frequency radio signals, with a special emphasis on a revolution currently taking place in the field involving advanced data analytics and machine learning approaches.

Speaker Bio: Morris Cohen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and served as a research scientist until August 2013. From September 2012 until August 2013, Dr. Cohen was appointed as AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation. In Fall 2013, he joined the faculty in the School of ECE. He is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2015, and was chosen for the Santimay Basu Prize in 2014, an award given once per 3 years to an under-35 scientist by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). He is an author of more than 60 journal publications and 150 conference presentations. He has traveled to all 7 continents and enjoys cooking, especially middle eastern food.