ARRC Seminar Series - Costas Pelekanakis

Title:

The next milestone:  adaptive and secure underwater acoustic communications

Abstract:

Underwater acoustic communications is the enabling technology for numerous applications for ocean exploration and exploitation. Signal processing at the physical layer has reached a certain mature level that allows commercial modems to achieve a few kilobits per second over a few kilometers of range. Currently, the research community explores ways to achieve higher spectral efficiencies in challenging environments with machine learning-based adaptive communications. In this talk, we discuss the application of boosted trees on the adaptive selection of bit rates subject to bit-error rate (BER) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraints. In the second part of the talk, we turn our attention to network security, which is important when it comes to transmitting sensitive data. We focus on the challenges of symmetric crypto-systems for ad-hoc underwater acoustic networks (UANs) and we discuss a novel way to generate cryptographic keys by exploiting the physical characteristics of the acoustic channel.

Bio:

Costas received his Diploma from Technical University of Crete, Greece, in 2001 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT, USA, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. From 2009 to 2015, he worked with the Acoustic Research Laboratory (ARL) at the National University of Singapore as a Research Fellow. He is currently a Senior Scientist at the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO), Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy. He was awarded the MIT Presidential Fellowship in 2001. In 2018, he was co-recipient of the NATO Scientific Achievement Award and in 2019 he was the co-recipient of the IET Premium Award for Best Paper in Radar, Sonar & Navigation.