Alfonso Farina

Alfonso Farina FREng (born January 25, 1948) is an Italian electronic engineer and former industry manager.

He is most noted for the development of the track while scan techniques for radars and generally for the development of a wide range of signal processing techniques used for sensors where tracking plays an essential role.

He is author of about 1000 publications.

His work was aimed to a synergistic cooperation between industry and academy.

Alfonso Farina was born in Petrella Salto, a small town near Rieti in 1948.

He obtained a doctoral – laurea - degree in electronic engineering on 1973 at University La Sapienza in Rome.

In 1974 he joined Selenia, a Finmeccanica company then become Selex ES.

Here he held the role of director of the analysis of integrate systems unit and then chief engineer of large business systems division.

More recently, he has been the senior VP CTO of the company and then senior advisor to the CTO.

This was the first time that such conference has been held outside US since its inception on 1974.

From 1979 to 1985 he also was professor ("incaricato") of radar techniques at the University of Naples.

From 1997 he is Fellow of IET.

Farina is IEEE Fellow since 2000 and International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2005, the latter with the citation "Distinguished for outstanding and continuous innovative in the development of radar signal and data processing techniques and application of these findings in practical systems".

He received the award from the hands of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

From 2004 to 2014, he led the team of engineers in conceiving, designing and implementing successive generations of improved PCL radar systems, extensively tested over several years.

Together with Hernandez and Ristic, he extended the theory and calculation of Posterior Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB) to the realistic case of detection probability less than 1 and probability of false alarm greater than 0, with practical applications to target tracking.

Together with Luigi Chisci and Giorgio Battistelli he has developed target tracking for radar systems.

In the recent decade, he has contributed to exploit his competence on signal processing in favor of cyber security of integrated systems.

He has been the organizer and general chairman of 2008 IEEE-AESS Radar Conference held in Rome.

He retired in October 2014 but, currently, works as a consultant.

The activity of Alfonso Farina spans a wide range of arguments in the area of radars and sensors.

His pioneering work on track while scan, now widely used in all radars, was recounted in a classical set of two books

that due to their widespread relevance have gone published also with Russian and Chinese translations.

A more recent publication by him also accounts for ideas and applications on adaptive radar signal processing.

He has also been the contributor to the article on ECCM, invited by Merrill Skolnik, in the second edition of the Radar Handbook (Ch. 9)

and the third (Ch. 24)

Together with Artenio Russo, he has generalised the well-known Swerling target fluctuation cases these being special cases.

Together with Sergio Barbarossa, he introduced time-frequency distributions in the analysis of synthetic-aperture radar signals The methods are useful, in particular, for the detection and imaging of objects moving on the Earth, observed from airborne or spaceborne synthetic aperture radars.

The approach was later extended to multi-antenna systems, giving rise to space-time-frequency processing.

He is considered the "father" of Italian industrial PCL radar.

Since 2014, he works as a consultant.

Recently, he gave an interview for the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, with Fulvio Gini hosting, recounting of his professional achievements and more.

Since 2017, he is the Chair of Italy Section Chapter, IEEE AESS-10.

Since 2017 (three-year term), he has been in the Editorial Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

He is Visiting Professor at University College of London and Cranfield University in UK.

In October 2018 he was interviewed at Rai Storia for the "70° anniversario di Leonardo Company" ("70th anniversary of Leonardo Company").

He is active in research on quantum radar.

Recently, he has been an associate editor of IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine for a special issue on quantum radar, published in two parts, together with Marco Frasca and Bhashyam Balaji.

Currently, he is ranked in the list of 2% top scientists in the World.

He is President of the Radar & Sensors Academy of Leonardo S.p.A. Electronic Division, Italy.