Enseignement/Teaching "The questions of the students are often the source of new research. They often ask profound questions that I've thought about at times and then given up on, so to speak, for a while. It wouldn't do me any harm to think about them again and see if I can go any further now. The students may not be able to see the thing I want to answer, or the subtleties I want to think about, but they remind me of a problem by asking questions in the neighborhood of that problem. It's not so easy to remind yourself of these things.
...
Finally, I said that I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything.
Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (1985)

Master 2 EEA

M1 EEA

Master 1 EEA

L3 EEA

Bachelor/Licence 3 EEA

LPRO IUT Ville d'Avray

IUT Ville d'Avray (2018-)

ISTA

ISTA Bamako (2021-2024)

Resources

Ressources


Ground Penetrating RADAR (GPR)

Ground Penetrating RADAR (GPR)

    A list of appearances of Ground Penetrating RADAR (GPR) on television, most usually erroneous, or yet another reason not to trust television. Ground Penetrating RADAR in


    Demonstration that ice is transparent to microwaves
    1. An advertisement stating that GSSI's GPR is used in Law & Order Special Victims Unit (S05E09: Control) so we start this list with a realistic depiction of GPR.
    2. Criminal Minds S01E14 (2006) (starting at 1365 seconds) with a beeping screen when the skeleton is seen. This reference was identified after reading From Criminal Minds to CSI: the rise of Ground Penetrating Radar in clandestine investigations (Aug. 2019).
    3. a radar profile starts Millennium (S02E15: Owls) and is actually not too bad. The radargram is again shown briefly on a screen later in the same episode.
    4. Columbo (Columbo likes the night life, end) looks like they are considering a SAR solution since even though the GPR is only moved in one direction, a 2-D image is generated.
    5. NCIS (episode 9, season 1, 31 min. from the beginning).
    6. CSI NY (episode 20, season 6, 1 min. 40 sec. from the beginning and episode 20, season 2).
    7. The newer seasons of the series (Season 14, Episode 18) is hardly better, with a radargram scrolling from top to bottom.
    8. CSI Miami (season 4, episode 18 -- Double Jeopardy -- and season 6, episode 18) is correct in the script but not in the image (shows a gun buried in concrete, but the actor speaks of a hyperbolic reflection, so ... half correct).
    9. Despite an initial attempt to get the science right in Bones (season 1, episode 7, 34 min 11 sec), the producers seem to have thought that the audience was not up to the task of thinking and reverted to the same idiocy as the other series (Bones (season 5, episode 1, 5 min. 38 sec) in which GPR even allows for identifying the material a reflector is made of.
    10. X-Files (season 1, epidosde 20) has an episode with a brief scene using GPR plotting on paper and a display on an echography-like screen not showing much other than noise (as observed in real life ? but why the cone-shaped field of view ? Scully: "An experienced operator attempts to differentiate if the signal is a body or is stone or a hole in the ground.").
    11. As opposed to the statement on the GSSI web page, I have not found reference to GPR in Jurassik Park, although there is a scene using seismic in which they detect centimeter-scale bones using meter-long waves (but then ... I have no expertise with seismic ...). I am greatful though to the GSSI Marketing Communications Manager for kindly providing the necessary information for locating the episode of Crossing Jordan, as stated on the GSSI web page and MTI web sites, for a brief reference to GPR and what looks like an actual, although static, radargram on the display.
    12. Hawaii Five-0 Season 2, Episode 7 (20 min. from beginning) needs 3 desktop LCD screens to display radargrams and beeps when bodies are "detected".
    13. Sanctuary (season 03, episode 16) does not bother showing the instrument but just mentions its existence.
    14. Season 1, Episode 8 (620 seconds from beginning) of La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) -- in French here -- mentions GPR for detecting tunnels buried 15-meters deep but not actual hardware shown.
    15. One "movie" refers to GPR, Return to House on Haunted Hill, but beyond exhibiting an inductively coupled metal detector, the movie is so bad that I did not bother checking if the GPR is actually used to find cavities.
    16. In the same vein, Flashpoint ("One Wrong Move") episode 14 of season 2, with a metal detector and some stuff glued to the coil.
    17. Lost Gold of WW2 (s01e06) (startingn at 405 s) is a real GPR radargram (finally !).
    18. Le Bureau des Légendes (season04, episode 5) exhibits the use of Through-the-Wall RADAR, closely related to GPR. While the depiction of the SAR measurement when scanning the radar on the wall seems accurate, the image is not, nor is the vertical resolution nor is the time refresh rate (the actor would have to scan the whole wall again for an updated image).
    19. In the "litterature", Dan Brown's Deception Point mentions GPR p.329 of the ebook version (Simon and Schuster, 2001): "Tolland helped her unpack the Ground Penetrating Radar and position it on the ice. The instrument looked like three miniature snowplow blades that had been affixed in parallel to an aluminum frame. The entire device was no more than a yard long and was connected by cables to a current attenuator and a marine battery on the sled.". So far so good, but then "Mike, I need to align the GPR transmitter with the meteorite site [...] All the work is in setup. The actual shot takes only a second." Wish it were ...
    20. Real life GPR measurement in the documentary Mont-Saint-Michel -- Le labyrinthe de l'archange on the French/German ARTE channel, with Christian Camerlynck (METIS lab., UPMC, Paris) measuring church pillars.
    21. Documentary excerpt, on the French/German ARTE channel, demonstrating the use of GPR in Petra (Jordan) for mapping underground structures.
    22. French news (August 2024) relating an attempt to locate a buried body.

Research

Research

Expertise (?!) in the development of passive wireless acoustic transducers acting as sensors, with the SENSeOR company and the Time and Frequency department of the FEMTO-ST institute (Besançon, France), focuses on bulk- and surface-acoustic transducers and the associated RADAR-like electronics systems for the development of passive sensors interrogated through a wireless radiofrequency link (see one of the latest presentations I gave on this topic). Previous activities (performed in IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, continued at FEMTO-ST) were concerned with the combination of Love mode surface acoustic wave sensors (SAW) [slides in French: presented 11/2006 at ENSL, France] (video of the presentation in French) and surface plasmon resonance (SPR) as well as quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) combination. Older work performed during my PhD includes noise analysis in a chaotic electronic circuit (Chua's circuit) and manipulation of nano/micrometric objects with AFM with force feedback (inclusion of an AFM in an SEM). I obtained my habilitation (HDR) in 2010 (manuscript and slides). I am currently an associate professor employed by the Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon, France, located at the Time and Frequency department of FEMTO-ST for my research activities. Following the 3-month visit to Pr. M Sato's laboratory in CNEAS (Sendai, Japan) end of 2017, my activities have shifted towards (passive) RADAR and phased antenna array processing, still applied to passive acoustic sensor cooperative targets.

Get in Touch

Contact

FEMTO-ST/Time and Frequency (ENSMM),
26 rue de l'Épitaphe,
25030 BESANCON cedex