Vesselin P. Jilkov, Ph.D., received the M.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Sofia in 1982, the Ph.D. degree in the Technical Sciences from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1988, and the academic rank Senior Research Fellow of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1997. Since 1999, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of New Orleans. Dr. Jilkov is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of applied statistical signal detection, estimation and filtering, stochastic hybrid systems, target tracking, detection, recognition, and multi-sensor data fusion. He has nearly 100 publications, including one book, and more than 950 citations in scholarly works of others. In the recent years, Dr. Jilkov he has been the principal investigator of two projects, sponsored by the Navy, and a 3-year RCS project sponsored by the Louisiana Board of Regents. He also has been a co-principal investigator of several other significant projects with Navy, Army, and Department of Defense.
At present, Dr. Jilkov is a University of New Orleans co-principal investigator of a $1.5 million project sponsored by NASA: “Integrated Trajectory Information Processing and Management for Aircraft Safety – ITIPS”, 2013 – 2015. The current research of Dr. Jilkov is focused on stochastic nonlinear filtering and parallel computing for target tracking and data fusion, and aircraft trajectory information processing for conflict detection and collision avoidance in next generation air traffic control systems.