ISAC in the Modern Battlefield: Distributed, Opportunistic, and Cognitive Sensing (NOVA FCT)

You are invited to participate in this joint event of IEEE VTS PT Chapter and IEEE ComSoc PT Chapter, held at NOVA FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Caparica, Portugal. The modern battlefield is becoming increasingly connected, contested, and data-driven, with sensing and communications performed by heterogeneous platforms operating under severe constraints on spectrum, hardware, and available information. This emerging paradigm presents fundamental challenges and exciting opportunities for signal processing and integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Future ISAC is not merely about putting radar and communications on the same platform. It is about turning every available signal, platform, and interaction into an opportunity for sensing and cognition. In this context, this talk explores representative advances across three complementary ISAC paradigms: coexistence, co-design, and opportunistic sensing. In the coexistence setting, we present a dual-blind deconvolution framework for overlaid radar-communications systems, where neither the transmitted signals nor the propagation channels are known. In co-design ISAC, we examine exploiting orbital angular momentum to exploit additional spatial degrees of freedom to jointly support sensing and communications. We then turn to opportunistic sensing, where communication infrastructure from satellites and 5G base stations is repurposed for sensing precipitation without dedicated radar hardware. We end with a more cognitive perspective through inverse stochastic filtering, where the objective moves beyond estimating physical parameters toward inferring latent processes and underlying causes from their observable consequences. Together, these examples point toward a broader vision of ISAC for the modern battlefield and beyond.