Athina P. Petropulu is Distinguished Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers, having served as chair of the department during 2010-2016.  Prior to joining Rutgers she was a Professor of ECE at Drexel University (1992-2010). She held Visiting Scholar appointments at SUPELEC, Universite’ Paris Sud, Princeton University and University of Southern California. Dr. Petropulu’s research interests span the area of statistical signal processing, wireless communications, signal processing in networking, physical layer security, and radar signal processing. Her research has been funded by various government industry sponsors including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Office of Naval research, the US Army, the National Institute of Health, the Whitaker Foundation, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Dr. Petropulu is Fellow of IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and recipient of the 1995 Presidential Faculty Fellow Award given by NSF and the White House. She is 2022-2023 President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). She has served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011) and IEEE Signal Processing Society Vice President-Conferences (2006-2008). She was General Chair of 2020 and 2021 IEEE SPS PROGRESS Workshops, General Co-Chair of the 2018 IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC), Kalamata Greece, and General Chair of the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP-05), Philadelphia PA. She was Distinguished Lecturer for the Signal Processing Society for 2017-2018, and is currently Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Aerospace & Electronics Systems Society. She is recipient of the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award, and co-recipient of the 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (B. Li), the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (F. Liu), the 2021 Barry Carlton Best Paper Award by IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society, and the 2022 IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop Best Student paper Award (Y. Li) and the 2023 Stephen O. Rice Prize Best Paper Award by the IEEE Communications Society.

Keynote talk description

Dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) systems are integrated sensing-communication systems that use the same waveform for simultaneously probing the surroundings and communicating with other equipment. DFRC systems offer high spectral, hardware and power efficiency, and as such are prime candidates for 6G wireless systems, such as autonomous driving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance, search and rescue, and advanced manufacturing where networked robots are involved in the manufacturing process. Before the DFRC promise is realized, several issues need to be addressed. One of those issues is security. By embedding communication information in the probing waveform, DFRC systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping by the targets. In this talk we will present a novel physical layer security (PLS) system design for optimizing the communication secrecy rate while maintaining sufficient power in the target echoes to ensure high target sensing performance. We will also present a novel Directional Modulation (DM) approach for achieving PLS, via which, the DFRC system is designed to deliver the signal intact to the legitimate destination and scrambled in all other directions. We will examine the possibility of the target/eavesdropper defying the proposed security measures and investigate additional protection measures.