Bosung Kang, Ph.D. student in electrical engineering, advised by Vishal Monga, won the First Place Award at 2014 IEEE Radar Conference Student Paper Competition. The paper is titled "Estimation of Structured Covariance Matrices for Radar STAP Under Practical Constraints." The paper focuses on solving convex optimization problems for covariance matrix estimation under practical constraints. In particular, this paper first reviews the rank constrained maximum likelihood (RCML) estimator which explicitly incorporates the rank of the clutter subspace as a constraint in the ML problem. Next, it introduces an efficient approximation of structured covariance under joint Toeplitz and rank constraint (EASTR).

Kang, who is planning to graduate in the summer of 2015, plans on pursuing a career in research focusing on convex optimization approaches in applications of radar signal processing and image and video signal processing.