[Research] Special Auton Lab Seminar: Dr. Simon Labov, Tue Dec 01 at 9am

[Artur Dubrawski]

(Note: there are two Auton Lab seminars scheduled on Tuesday,
the other announcement to follow shortly)


*Title*

Nuclear Analytics for National Security

Simon Labov
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory


*Time and Place*

Tuesday December 1st 2009, 9:00 AM
NSH 1507


*Abstract*

Radiation detection systems are currently deployed at ports of entry to 
scan incoming vehicles and cargo for radiological or nuclear threats, 
and there is ongoing development work to further improve their 
effectiveness. Mobile detection systems and radiation sensor networks 
are also being developed to address threats that do not pass through 
these ports, are missed by the port systems, or are created within the 
country.  In some cases new detection technology hardware can provide a 
cost-effective performance improvement for these systems.  But in all 
cases, improved analysis techniques and algorithms can provide 
significant performance improvements with only minimal cost of 
deployment.  Nuclear analytics goes beyond the standard signal 
processing techniques used in the conventional analysis of nuclear 
measurement data and brings more comprehensive analysis approaches to 
the problem.  Machine learning, expert systems, data mining, sensor 
fusion and data fusion are some of the techniques that can be used to 
enhance threat sensitivity with the extremely low false alarm tolerance 
required for nuclear threat detection systems.  This talk will introduce 
the nuclear security problem, review current and emerging detection 
systems, and discuss on-going work in nuclear analytics for nuclear 
screening, mobile search and distributed sensor network systems.

This work was supported by the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office of the 
Department of Homeland Security and performed under the auspices of the 
U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 
under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

*Speaker's Bio*

Simon Labov is the Associate Program Leader for Detection Systems in the 
Nuclear Detection and Countermeasures Research Program at Lawrence 
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He received a B.S. in physics from 
Stanford University in 1980, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in astronomy from U.C. 
Berkeley in 1984 and 1988 respectively. Before coming to LLNL, his work 
focused on X-ray and UV instrumentation for astronomy including filters, 
optics and detectors. He designed and built a grazing-incidence extreme 
ultraviolet spectrometer, and flew it on a sounding rocket to measure 
diffuse emission from the hot gas in the interstellar medium. In 1987 he 
joined LLNL as a postdoctoral researcher and helped initiate a program 
to develop high-resolution energy-dispersive X-ray detectors that 
operate at very low temperatures. As a career physicist at LLNL he built 
this program to include optical and gamma-ray detectors, and ion 
detectors for time-of-flight mass spectrometry with large biomolecules. 
In 1999 he formed the Radiation Detection Center (RDC) to create a focus 
for detector development work throughout the laboratory.  He served as 
Director of the RDC from 1999 to 2006.