2016 Early Achievement Award

Presented to: Dr. Pau Closas

Citation: For mathematically profound contributions to the design of advanced navigation receivers and for efforts in disseminating GNSS technology.

Dr. Pau Closas has focused his research on designing advanced receivers, with the ultimate goal of improving GNSS accuracy, robustness, and reliability. He has proposed innovative solutions in direct positioning estimation - a ground-breaking receiver architecture that surpasses the performance of current two-steps receiver schemes in challenging scenarios where signals are severely degraded; robust tracking loops with the goals of conferring multipath mitigation capabilities and designing scintillation-robust receivers; hybridization of technologies (including GNSS, INS, WiFi, UWB or Bluetooth) for seamless positioning where he developed Bayesian filters that operate efficiently in nonlinear/non-Gaussian systems and in high-dimensional configurations; anti-jamming/spoofing techniques with focus on analyzing impacts on receiver blocks and mitigating their effects (including a theory and implementation of array signal processing for GNSS, beamforming, optimal spoofing detection, and decoding mechanisms under jamming); and software-defined receivers, where with his collaborators, he is managing and promoting the use of a fully open-source receiver (gnss-sdr.org) with the goal of disseminating and outreaching wide audiences.

Dr. Closas has been recognized for his ability to question well-established concepts of navigation, and to revisit them with mathematically sound concepts while striving to bring together the fields of navigation and signal processing, resulting in inventive designs and top-notch contributions in the art of ranging and positioning.

Dr. Closas has over 10 years of experience in projects funded by the European Commission, Spanish and Catalan governments, as well as the European Space Agency (ESA) in both technical and managerial duties. He has collaborated in projects of the USA’s National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation (NNSF) of China. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. Dr. Closas received his MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2003 and 2009, respectively. He also holds a MSc degree in Advanced Mathematics and Mathematical Engineering from UPC earned in 2014.