General Co-Chairs
Pieter de Villiers (University of Pretoria)
Pieter de Villiers is an associate professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and was a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) until October 2017. He obtained his Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and a PhD in 2008 at the University of Cambridge, UK in statistical signal processing (particle filtering) under the supervision of Prof Simon Godsill. From 2010 until 2018 he was performing research into data fusion at the Radar and Electronic Warfare competency at the CSIR. His research interests include data fusion, target tracking, Bayesian inference, nonlinear filtering, pattern recognition, graphical models and machine learning. Pieter has been regularly attending Fusion conferences since 2010 and his ISIF activities include membership of the technical program committee and acting as session chairs for Fusion conferences, as well as being a member of the official ISIF Evaluation Techniques for Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Working Group (ETURWG). He is also a guest editor for a special issue at the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion.
Alta de Waal (University of Pretoria)
Alta de Waal currently holds a senior lecturer position in the Statistics Department, University of Pretoria. Previously, she was employed since 1999 at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Research interests include probabilistic graphical models and unsupervised modelling of discrete data. Of special focus is the modelling of trans-disciplinary scenarios which relies on data fusion methodologies. Alta has published 30 scientific papers in the form of conference proceedings, journals and book chapters. She received her MSc (Mathematical Statistics) from the University of the Free State (2000), and her PhD (Engineering Science) from the North West University, South Africa (2010). She is a NRF (National Research Foundation) rated researcher. Alta has been attending the Fusion Conference since 2015, and has taken part in the activities of the official ISIF Evaluation Techniques for Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Working Group (ETURWG).
Fredrik Gustafsson (Linköping University)
Fredrik Gustafsson has been professor in Sensor Informatics at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Linkoping University, since 2005. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering 1988 and the Ph.D. degree in Automatic Control, 1992, both from Linkoping University. His research interests are in stochastic signal processing, adaptive filtering and change detection, with applications to communication, vehicular, airborne, and audio systems. His work in the sensor fusion area involves design and implementation of nonlinear filtering algorithms for localization, navigation and tracking of all kind of platforms, including cars, aircraft, spacecraft, UAV’s, surface and underwater vessels, cell phones and film cameras for augmented reality. He is a co-founder of the companies NIRA Dynamics (automotive safety, including tire pressure monitoring systems found in more than 25 million cars), Softube (plug-ins for music studios and software solutions found in for instance Marshall and Fender), and Senionlab (indoor navigation for smartphones deployed in more than 30 countries in all six continents).
Technical Chairs
Paulo Costa (George Mason University)
Paulo Costa is Associate Professor of Systems Engineering and Operations Research at George Mason University. His current research involves applying semantic technologies and probabilistic reasoning to proactive decision support, modeling and simulation to the design of cyber resilient systems, and knowledge engineering to the integration of hard and soft data. He currently teaches courses on advanced security protocols, decision support systems, and heterogeneous data fusion. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology and M.Sc. in Systems Engineering from George Mason University, and his B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the Brazilian Air Force Academy. He is a co-founder and active participant in the ISIF Working Group on Evaluation of Techniques for Uncertainty Reasoning (ETURWG), a senior member at IEEE, and previously served on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion.
Anne-Laure Jousselme (NATO STO CMRE)
Anne-Laure Jousselme has been with the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia (Italy) since June 2014. She was previously with the Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) in Valcartier. She received her PhD in 1997 jointly from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (France) and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering Department of Laval University in Quebec City (Canada). She has been a member of the boards of directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) and of the Belief Functions and Applications Society (BFAS) since 2012. She is a member of the steering committee of the BELIEF conference and an active member of the ISIF working group on Evaluation Techniques of Uncertainty Representation (ETUR). She has been adjunct professor at Laval University (Quebec, Canada) for10 years where she supervised master and PhD theses in the field of information fusion. Her current research interests include high‐level information fusion, reasoning under uncertainty, target recognition and identification and maritime anomaly detection. She was technical and tutorial chair of Fusion 2007, an international chair of Fusion 2015, and is a co-technical chair of Fusion 2019.
Thia Kirubarajan (McMaster University)
Thia Kirubarajan (Kiruba) holds the title of Distinguished Engineering Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Information Fusion at McMaster University, Canada. He has published about 375 research articles, 11 book chapters, one standard textbook on target tracking and four edited volumes. He has lead multiple projects on tracking and fusion with support from the Canadian Department of National Defense, US Air Force, US Navy, NASA, NSERC, Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, General Dynamics Canada, Raytheon Canada, ComDev/exactEarth, Toyota, Thales Canada and Lockheed Martin Canada. In addition to conducting research, he has worked extensively with government labs and companies to process real data and to transition his research to the real world. He is a recipient of the Ontario Premier’s Research Excellence Award and the IEEE AESS Barry Carlton Award. He was the co-technical chair of Fusion 2002 and awards chair of Fusion 2014, and he is a co-technical chair of Fusion 2019.
Simon Godsill (University of Cambridge)
Simon Godsill is Professor of Statistical Signal Processing in the Engineering Department at Cambridge University. He is also a Professorial Fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi College Cambridge. He coordinates an active research group in Signal Inference and its Applications within the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory at Cambridge, specializing in Bayesian computational methodology, multiple object tracking, audio and music processing, and financial time series modeling. A particular methodological theme over recent years has been the development of novel techniques for optimal Bayesian filtering and smoothing, using Sequential Monte Carlo or Particle Filtering methods. Prof. Godsill has published extensively in journals, books and international conference proceedings, and has given a number of high profile invited and plenary addresses at conferences including the Fusion Conference. Prof. Godsill has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Tr. Signal Processing and the journal Bayesian Analysis. Two of his journal papers recently received Best Paper awards from the IEEE and IET. He is a Director of CEDAR Audio Ltd. (which has received numerous accolades over the years, including a technical Oscar), a company which utilises his research work in the audio area.
Lyudmila Mihaylova (University of Sheffield)
Lyudmila Mihaylova is a Professor of signal processing and control with the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Her research is in the areas of autonomous systems with various applications such as navigation, surveillance, and sensor networks. She is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and for the Elsevier Signal Processing Journal. She is on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF) and was the ISIF President in the period 2016–2018. She has given a number of talks and tutorials, including NATO SET- 262 AI 2018, Fusion 2017 (Xi’an, China), the plenary talk for the IEEE Sensor Data Fusion 2015 (Germany), invited talks at IPAMI Traffic Workshop 2016 (USA) and others. Prof. Mihaylova is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems and of the Elsevier Signal Processing Journal. She was the general vice-chair for the International Conference on Information Fusion 2018 (Cambridge, UK), of the IET Data Fusion & Target Tracking 2014 and 2012 Conferences and others.
Zhansheng Duan (Xi’an Jiaotong University)
Zhansheng Duan is a professor in the Center for Information Engineering Science Research at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. Hereceived the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Xi’an Jiaotong University. He also received Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of New Orleans, LA. His research interests are in estimation and detection theory, target information processing, information fusion, nonlinear filtering, and performance evaluation. He is a Board of Directors member of ISIF (International Society of Information Fusion). He also served as an associate editor for MFI 2015-2017 (2015-2017 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Information Integration) and an associate editor for CCC 2011-2019 (30th-38th Chinese Control Conference). He was a TPC member for FUSION 2009-2019, a program co-secretary for FUSION 2017, an international liaison co-chair for FUSION 2019, and a PC member for ATC 2016-2019 (13th-16th IEEE International Conference on Advanced and Trusted Computing).
Program Chairs
Erik Blasch (US Air Force Research Lab)
Erik Blasch is a program officer at United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) – Air Force of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Previously, he was a principal scientist at AFRL in Rome, NY (2012-2017); exchange scientist to Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) at Valcartier, Quebec (2009-2012); and Information Fusion Evaluation Tech Lead at AFRL in Dayton, OH (2000-2009). Dr. Blasch has been an Adjunct Electrical Engineering Professor at Wright State University teaching signal processing, target tracking, and information fusion. Dr. Blasch served on the IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS) Board of Governors (2011-2016), was a founding member of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF), and the 2007 ISIF President. He has focused on information fusion, target tracking, pattern recognition, and robotics research compiling 650+ scientific papers and book chapters. He holds 14 patents, presented over 30 tutorials, and is an associate editor of three academic journals. His books include High-Level Information Fusion Management and Systems Design(Artech House, 2012), Context-Enhanced Information Fusion (Springer, 2016), and Multispectral Image Fusion and Colorization(SPIE, 2017).
Kathryn Laskey (George Mason University)
Kathryn B. Laskey is Professor of Systems Engineering and Operations Research and Associate Director of the C4I & Cyber Center at George Mason University. Her primary research interest is probabilistic and decision theoretic reasoning with application to a variety of problems in information fusion and decision support under uncertainty. A major thrust of her work is integration of semantic technology with probability to support higher-level information fusion. She teaches courses in systems engineering, Bayesian inference and decision support. She is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence and serves on the Boards of the International Society of Information Fusion and the Washington Metropolitan Area Chapter of INCOSE. She is a co-founder and active participant in the ISIF Working Group on Evaluation of Techniques for Uncertainty Reasoning (ETURWG). Dr. Laskey received a Ph.D. in Statistics and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh.
Local Arrangements Chairs
Molahlegi Molope (Armscor)
Molahlegi Molope has BSc in Electrical Engineering from a university in the USA and has just submitted his dissertation for M Eng. (Radar & Electronic Defence) at a South African university and is currently registering for a PHD in Electrical Engineering focusing on a Radar topic at a South African university. In addition to Engineering, he is also passionate about business and he has obtained an MBA degree from a South African university in this regard. Early in his career he did development work in the telecommunications environment and was introduced to the Radar and the EW world when he joined Armscor as a Project Manager. He is currently the Divisional Head of Telecommunications and Sensing Systems division in Armscor, which is a division responsible for acquisition of telecommunications systems, Radars, EW (Comms EW, Radar EW and Optronics EW) and IW. He was the treasurer of the South African AOC branch for several years and in 2013 he became the Chairperson of South African Radar Interest Group (SARIG). In these two organisations he has always been a member of the LOC organising several conferences and one of them is the IEEE 2015 Radar conference whereby he assumed the role of the conference treasurer. In 2020 he was also an LOC member of the team that organised the Fusion 2020 conference which was hosted virtually. During his spare time he enjoys experimenting with SDRs in the fields of Radar and Comms EW.
Terence van Zyl (WITS)
Terence van Zyl is an Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, he has research interests in data science pertaining to anomaly detection, predictive analytics, signal/image processing, streaming data analytics, machine learning, and data-intensive computing to deal with these spatial and temporal big data challenges. The applications can range anywhere from novel insights about our planet to disruptive technologies that change our world.
Allan de Freitas (University of Pretoria)
Allan De Freitas is a senior lecturer at the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He received a Ph.D. degree in the Automatic Control and Systems Engineering department at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He first attend the International Conference on Information Fusion in 2012. He has presented research at the conference for 5 consecutive years, and held the role of session chair. His principal scientific interests are in the areas of signal processing in object tracking, advanced sensor networks, and image processing.
Richard Focke (Saab)
Richard Focke is a signal processing senior engineer at Saab, and until 2018 was a senior engineer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Cape Town, 2015 with a thesis titled: “Investigating the Use of Interval Algebra to Schedule Mechanically Steered Multistatic Radars”. His other qualifications include a B.Eng (Hons) Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria 2005 and a B.Eng Computer Engineering, University of Pretoria 2003. He is a member of the IEEE. He has five years experience on implementing software solutions for EMV payment systems in the South African banking sector and ten years working experience at the CSIR DPSS on implementing Xilinx FPGA firmware and embedded software for radar signal processing. In addition he has five years systems engineering experience at CSIR DPSS on radar subsystems. He has a general interest in information fusion and in particular sensor scheduling, and has contributed papers to Fusion conferences.
Finance Chair
Jacques van Wyk (University of Pretoria)
Jacques H. van Wyk is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria since January 2003. He obtained his B.Eng (Electronic Engineering) and M.Eng (Electronic) degrees from the University of Pretoria in 1997 and 2000 respectively.He hold a PhD in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pretoria, 2017. His research focus is on Orthogonal Spreading sequence design, Multi-carrier CDMA and xDSL technology. His research interests includes Access technologies (xDSL, LTE and 5G), VoLTE, Information Storage and Management, and Edge Cloud. He acted as Director for the Centre for Telecommunication Engineering (2009-2015), ICT’05 Treasurer, IEEE Africon ’07 Treasurer, IEEE Africon ’09 Treasurer, IEEE South Africa Section Treasurer (2008-2010), IEEE South Africa Section Chair (2011-2012), IEEE ICIT 2013 Treasurer, IEEE South Africa Section: Assistant Treasurer (2017-November 2017) and IEEE South Africa Section: Treasurer (November 2017-present). He established the Huawei Accredited Information and Networking Academy (HAINA) in Storage technology at the University of Pretoria in November 2018.He is a Senior Member of the IEEE since 2010 and a Registered Professional Engineering with ECSA since 2008.
Publications Chairs
Gregor Pavlin (Thales Research and Technology)
Gregor Pavlin is a Senior researcher and program manager at Thales Research and Technology. He holds a PhD, Computer Science (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and his research interests include data fusion, target tracking, machine learning, Bayesian networks, artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. He acts as a coordinator of European projects (FP7 and EDA) and expert on the review panel for European projects. He is a member of the technical program committees/reviewer for the International Conference on Information Fusion, International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC), the STIDS conference, the Information Fusion Journal, IEEE transactions on man machine and cybernetics and acted as co-chair and editor of the Fifth International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC 2011). Dr Pavlin is also a member of the ISIF Evaluation of Techniques for Uncertainty Representation Working Group (ETURWG). Dr Pavlin authored or co-authored over 60 peer reviewed publications (articles and conference papers).
Constantino Rago (Systems and Technology Research) Constantino Rago is a senior member of technical staff at Systems and Technology Research, Woburn, Massachusetts. His research interest includes estimation, fusion and target tracking. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, and MS and Ph.D. degrees also in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut. He has served as associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
Tutorials Chair
Denis Garagic (BAE Systems)
Denis Garagić is a Chief Scientist in the Sensor Processing and Exploitation (SPX) group under BAE Systems Technology Solutions. He is a key innovator, guiding SPX’s creation of cognitive computing solutions that provide machine intelligence and anticipatory intelligence to solve challenges across any domain for multiple United States Department of Defense customers including DARPA, the services, and the intelligence community. Denis has 20 years of experience in the areas of autonomous cooperative control for unmanned vehicles; game theory for distributed and hierarchical multilevel decision-making, agent-based modeling and simulation; artificial intelligence and machine learning for multi-sensor data fusion, complex scene understanding, motion activity pattern learning and prediction, learning communications signal behavior, speech recognition and automated text generation. Denis has been a Technical Review Authority, Principal Investigator, or Research Lead on numerous Department of Defense programs. He has written a number of journal articles and conference papers, with several patents in applied controls for autonomous robotics and generic machine learning inference with applications to streaming data processing. He received his B.S. and M.S. (Mechanical Engineering & Technical Cybernetics; Applied Mathematics) degrees from The Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic, and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering – System Dynamics & Controls from The Ohio State University. Denis also received an Executive Certificate in Strategy & Innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Stefano Coraluppi 
Stefano Coraluppi is a Chief Scientist at Systems & Technology Research (STR). He received the BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 1992 and 1997. He has held research staff positions at ALPHATECH Inc. (1997-2002), the NATO Undersea Research Centre (2002-2010), Compunetix Inc. (2010-2014), and STR (since 2014). His research interests include multi-target tracking, multi-sensor data fusion, distributed detection and estimation, and optimal and stochastic control. He is Technical Editor for Target Tracking and Multisensor Systems and Associate Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, and Editor-in-Chief for the ISIF Journal of Advances in Information Fusion. He serves on the IEEE AESS Board of Governors and the ISIF Board of Directors. He served as General Co-chair for FUSION 2006, Technical/Program Co-chair for FUSION 2014-2016 and 2018, and Awards Co-Chair for FUSION 2019.
Awards Chair
Nageswara Rao (ORNL)
Nageswara S. V. Rao is a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA. He received PhD in computer science from Louisiana State University in 1988, ME from Indian Institute of Science in 1984, and BTech from National Institute of technology, Warangal, India in 1982. He has published more than 400 conference and journal papers in the areas of theoretical computer science, sensor networks, information fusion and high-performance networking. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and received 2005 IEEE Technical Achievement Award for his contributions to information fusion area. He co-organized the Workshop on Information and Decision Fusion in 1996. He served as Associate Editor for Information Fusion journal, and is currently Area Editor of ISIF Journal of Advances in Information Fusion. He is Co-Chair of Technical Program Committee for Fusion 2017.
Special Sessions Chair
Roy Streit (Metron, Inc)
Roy Streit is currently a Senior Scientist at Metron, Inc., a scientific consulting company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. His research interests include multi-target tracking, multi-sensor data fusion, distributed autonomous systems, and signal processing, as well as statistical methods for pharmacovigilance and business analytics. Prior to joining Metron in 2005, he was a Senior Scientist in the Senior Executive Service at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, working primarily on the development, evaluation and application of multi-sensor data fusion algorithms in support of submarine sonar and combat control automation.He is Fellow of the IEEE . He is President of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Information Fusion (ISIF). He has published numerous papers in over a dozen different refereed technical journals, and has given many invited and contributed papers at national and international conferences. Additionally, he holds seven U.S. patents.
Joel Dabrowski (CSIRO)
Joel Dabrowski is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia. He was a senior lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering at the University of Pretoria, South Africa until 2017. He has ten years’ industry experience in software and hardware development in electricity smart meters. He received his PhD in engineering at the University of Pretoria, with a thesis titled “Contextual behavioral modelling and classification of vessels in a maritime piracy situation”. His interests include dynamic Bayesian networks, Bayesian inference and reasoning, and machine learning. He has published articles with a strong information fusion flavour in journals such as Information Fusion.
Sponsors Chair
Mike Inggs (University of Cape Town)
Michael Inggs was born and educated in the Eastern Cape, South Africa (Uitenhage and Grahamstown). He has an Honours degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Rhodes University (1973) and a PhD, DIC from Imperial College, London (1979). He has worked in industry in the UK, USA and South Africa, and joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Cape Town in 1988, where he holds the rank of Professor. He holds a Visiting Professorship at University College London. His research is in the area of radar, radar remote sensing and high performance computing. He has more than 190 journal and conference publications, four patents, and has supervised more than 90 M.Sc. and 10 Ph.D. to completion. He is a member of the Administration Committee of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society 2011-2013 as Director of Education, member IEEE AESS Radar Panel, and after being the convenor of the taught masters M.Eng.(Radar) program at UCT, was funded as a Research Professor by KACST for 2014. In 2015 he was on sabbatical leave at the Technical University of Delft.
Publicity Chair
Willie Nel (CSIR)
Willie Nel is a Principal Radar Systems Engineer & Technology and Innovation Manager for Radar at the unit for Defence, Peace, Safety and Security (DPSS), Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa. Current and past responsibilities include technology management in CSIR Radar area, looking at ways to increase innovation and improve time to market of technology demonstrators, consulting several areas in radar including Radar NCTR research program and radar signal processor development of AwareRad radar. Willie is a lead systems engineer for spaceborne radar, imaging radar, GPS reflectometry, multi-static radar and other new initiatives in Radar and Electronic Warfare (REW). He is Chair of the CSIR ICT Governance Committee, leader of the DPSS REW technology innovation leadership team and was Technical Chair of the IEEE Radar Conference held in October 2015 in South Africa. He also represents DPSS at the South African Radar Interest Group.
International Liaisons
Daniel O’Hagan (Fraunhofer FHR)
is the Head of Department, Passive Radar and Anti-Jamming Techniques at Fraunhofer FHR. Until 2018, he was an Associate Professor in Radar at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and occupied this post since mid-2014. While at UCT, he was the Convener of the UCT Radar Masters Course, which attracted some of the world’s top radar talent as guest lecturers on the UCT program. Dr. O’Hagan was the TPC co-chair of the 2015 IEEE Radar Conference. Dr. O’Hagan is the Chairman of the NATO Sensors and Electronics Technology group, “Advanced situation-specific modeling and vulnerability mitigation using passive radar technology SET-207”. He chairs a multinational team of distinguished scientists from throughout NATO and Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations. From 2010 to 2013, Dr. O’Hagan served as the German representative to, and chairman of, the NATO “Advanced Modelling and Systems Applications for Passive Sensors group SET-164”. He has obtained a Ph.D. in radar from University College London.
Zhun-ga Liu (Northwestern Polytechnical University )
Zhun-ga Liu was born in China. He is full time professor in School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) since July, 2017. He obtained the Bachelor and Master degree from NPU in 2007 and 2010 respectively, and a Ph.D degree from Telecom Bretagne, France in 2014. His current research interests mainly focus on information fusion, belief functions and pattern recognition. He has published more than 30 journal and conference papers in IEEE TFS, TCYB, TIP, TSMC, PR and FUSION conferences. He serves as Board of Director in The Belief functions and Applications society (BFAS). He was TPC member and session chair for many international conferences like FUSION 2014-2018, and he served as special sessions/panels cochair in organization committee of FUSION2019. He is the area editor of International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, and the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems.