EECS Ph.D. Student Earns 3rd place in IEEE Radar Conference Paper Contest.

The 2016 IEEE Radar Conference, held in May in Philadelphia, is the premier conference devoted to advancing radar technology. There were 139 student papers following the standard paper review process. Ten were selected as finalists to present their work to a panel of judges. McCormick’s paper was titled “A Gradient Descent Implementation of Adaptive Pulse Compression.” The paper provided a new implementation of this sensitivity enhancing algorithm that provides orders of magnitude reduction in computational cost and included an experimental demonstration of the approach on measured radar data. With the rapid acceleration and ubiquity of high-speed processors, this approach could facilitate the realization of real-time operation on fielded radar systems.

McCormick works in the KU Radar Systems & Remote Sensing Lab (RSL) that has garnered a world-renowned reputation for innovations in radar since its inception in 1964. His graduate advisor is EECS Professor Shannon Blunt; Dr. Blunt has recently been elevated to IEEE Fellow status and received the 2012 IEEE/AESS Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award for "contributions to adaptive radar signal processing and waveform diversity"