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Recent development in radar systems have led to high dimensional data collection. Advancements in position, navigation and timing allow distributed networks of radars to operate coherently together, with multiple radar transmitters and receivers operating coherently in “multi-static” configurations. Emitters of opportunity from communications allow radars to operate in passively. A new ubiquity in radar satellites results in ever shorter repeat passes, providing a richness in temporal data which can be used for interferometry and detection of changes.  Radars are able to operate over increasingly wider frequency bandwidths, with greater adaptivity of emitted waveforms, can be fully polarimetric, receive ever more channels from array antennas, and fuse information from multiple sources to operate adaptively.  These developments often enable – and are driven by – using radars for more challenging applications, such as imaging through walls, foliage and other obscurants; detecting and recognising low observable objects; or adapting to operate in a congested and contested electromagnetic environment.

The increased complexity and dimensionality of radar data brings new fundamental mathematical challenges, such as: what information does it contain; how should the large quantities be efficiently and effectively processed and shared between systems; how should distributed systems be deployed or designed to best find objects of interest; how should more complex electromagnetic interactions be efficiently modelled; and how can radar images be formed which resolve complex electromagnetic scattering effects.

This knowledge transfer workshop was organised with the NATO Science and Technology Organisation (STO) as a NATO Research Specialists Meeting. Attendance was by invitation only from STO National Delegates and from SET Panel Members, and was restricted to citizens of NATO member nations plus AUS, CHE, FIN, IRL, JPN, KOR, SWE, and ZAF.