Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music] I'm Chris Baker and I'm an Ohio State
Research Scholar in Integrated Sensor Systems
and my research is specializing in the application of cognition to radar sensors.
Yeah, so I'm British, as you can tell from my accent, and I spent most of my career
working for the British Ministry of Defense, in one of their research establishments.
I then left to become an academic about ten years ago,
working first at University College in London, then the
Australian National University in Australia, and now here at Ohio State.
I've spent all of my life working in radar systems and
my enduring interest is trying to extract information from echo signals,
because if we can do that, we can do so much more with the sensors.
And, a particular theme that I'm developing at the moment,
is trying to apply the ideas of cognition, the type of cognition
that you and I use as human beings, and put that into radar systems
to give them much more ability than to just, for example,
take a picture to detect aircraft in the sky, and
present that as a picture to an operator. So, in the research that we're doing, traditionally,
radar sensors and many other sensors, vision sensors
as well, whilst they've become more and more sophisticated,
they don't do much more than a camera does, which just take a picture and present a picture
to a person.
So what we're trying to do in radar is go beyond that.
So an example that I often use is air traffic control.
We're all familiar with an air traffic control radar.
It turns round and round at the airport and it maps out the location of aircraft in the sky
And that's great. It presents that picture then to an operator
and the operator makes decisions about the relative positions of the aircraft
and then sends out a command or an instruction to them to reposition themselves
so there are safe landings and takeoffs.
Now, what we're trying to do with our research is effectively be able to replace the cognitive
part of that system. And the cognitive part of that system
is the human operator.
And this is very pertinent to a whole raft of application areas
and one that will have massive implications in the future,
which is beginning to be spoken about in the newspapers,
is driverless cars.
And, in principal, through the use of these kinds of
artificial radar techniques, applied not just to radar sensors,
but to sensors in general, we genuinely have the potential
for creating driverless and accidentless cars. The longer that you've been involved in
a research area, the more worried I become about being
a little bit trammeled in my thinking. So when I work with undergraduates and graduates,
it's their lack of experience that doesn't get in the way
that I like. And I like to see the way that they are able to explore ideas
and research threads, that maybe wouldn't have occurred to me,
but might just lead to somewhere significant in terms of the findings.