Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine April 2017 - 40

DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2017.160271

AESS Historical Interview
Conversation with Paul Rosen
Interviewer: Riccardo Lanari

INTRODUCTION TO THE CONVERSATION
In this fifth historical interview, a fascinating conversation with
Paul Rosen by Riccardo Lanari, both valued members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace and
Electronic Systems Society (AESS), AESS offers our members insight into the people behind the many great contributions that grace
our field. While these interviews document historical events, they
are also intended to give readers insights into the events and critical decisions that shaped the research, technical accomplishments,
and career of our society's most legendary contributors.

INTERVIEW
Riccardo to Paul: Paul Rosen, I am very pleased to interview you
(Figure 1). We will focus in our conversation on your extraordinary
accomplishments in the field of radar imaging of the Earth surface
from space. However, before starting to talk about it, I am sure that
many readers, particularly the younger ones, would like to know
how you became involved in radar developments and how you
reached this actual point in your career. Can you say something on
where you grew up and your first studies?
Paul: I grew up in an academic family in Swarthmore, PA.
My father was a professor of mathematics at Swarthmore College, and my mother was on the staff of the biology department
at the college. I was mostly interested in literature and music in
high school, but I also did well at mathematics and physics, so I
was encouraged to pursue engineering "so I could get a job," the
primary concern of Depression-era parents. I enrolled in electrical engineering at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania, with a bioengineering focus: it seemed to be a broad field
with many opportunities, and at the time bioengineering was new
and exciting. After several lab experiments with animals, I realized I would do better in a different area, and fortunately my
freshman adviser, Dr. Haralambos Kritikos, studied theoretical
electromagnetics and the new field of remote sensing, which was
to become my area of interest.
Dr. Kritikos was also passionate about music, so we got along
very well. He introduced me to ocean color data sets to study
pollution in the Aegean Sea. To understand and analyze these
data sets, I had to develop a broad range of skills in computer
interfaces, programming, image analysis, and radiative transfer. This seemed like a great new area to study, so I stayed with
Dr. Kritikos through my master's degree. This was an era when
40

computers were large institutional machines, punch cards were
still being used to load programs, data were delivered on ninetrack tapes in cryptic formats, and half the work in displaying
imaging results was in programming the graphics interface. I
remember for my master's thesis, I had to write a computer program that used line-printer overstriking of characters to create
an artificial grayscale to print low-resolution images. I'm not
sure young readers will even know what a line printer is! These
early experiences with computers were actually very important
for my future work. The Moore School had a long heritage of excellence in computer engineering and science-the world's first
digital computer, the ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer], was created there-and the culture supporting
creative uses of computers and problem solving permeated the
staff and students. There was nothing that these people could not
do, with very primitive tools. Modifying code at the assembly level
was common when compilers did not comply. Undocumented interfaces and formats were puzzles to be solved. New computer
languages were being assessed and debated all the time. Since
remote sensing is compute intensive, with data coming from a
variety of sources, this detailed knowledge, the programming
skills, and the confidence that all problems could be solved really
helped me to tackle challenging problems. As a simple example,
when I was hired as a summer student at JPL [Jet Propulsion
Laboratory], my first task was to figure out how to display an

Figure 1.

Present-day: Paul Rosen posing with a model of the NISAR spacecraft.
Paul is the project scientist for this NASA-ISRO science mission collaboration to map Earth with L-band and S-band polarimetric radars.
NISAR is planned for launch in 2021.

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

APRIL 2017



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