Hume Seminar Series: Modern Communications Concerns for Contested Environments

About the Event

Tech Talk and free pizza! In this talk, Dr. Ernst will discuss some of the current challenges for communications systems in contested environments.  In the counter terrorism efforts, the US armed forces enjoyed largely uncontested electromagnetic operations.  A refocusing has recently been required to coordinate many historically separate capabilities under the new area of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO).  This includes Electronic Warfare (EW), Spectrum Management, Information Operations (IO), and Electronic Protection (EP).  Dr. Ernst will discuss these new challenges, will provide some basic information about cryptography, LPI/LPD systems, key exchange, and will discuss some of Rampart's solutions to some of these problems. Pizza and drinks will be provided at the end of this seminar. 

About the Speaker

Dr. Joseph Ernst

Ernst graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in the area of Statistical Signal Processing.  He served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and a Research Assistant Professor at the Virginia Tech (VT) Hume Center.  He has contributed three course modules to the Virginia Cyber Range.  After Virginia Tech, Joseph worked at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory (JHU/APL).  While there he had several roles including both the Electromagnetic Dominance Research Area Lead for the Special Operations Mission Area and an Assistant Program Manager for the Cyber Operations Mission Area.  Dr. Ernst now works at Rampart Communications, which seeks to provide unprecedented communications security and privacy with physical layer encryption technologies.