Pierre Valin Biography

Dr. Pierre Valin taught and conducted research in theoretical physics (elementary particles) at various universities for over 12 years after graduating from Harvard with a Ph.D. in 1980. He then spent over 10 years at Lockheed Martin Canada as a Senior Member of Engineering R&D, acquiring expertise in data/information fusion, reasoning under uncertainty, imagery classifiers and their fusion, to name a few. He also supervised students from the Université de Montréal as an adjunct professor. He joined Defense R&D Canada at Valcartier in 2004, where he is now Group Leader of the Situation Assessment and Information Fusion (SAIF) group, while also an adjunct professor at Université Laval for the supervision of graduate students. His main interests are in Multi-Sensor Data Fusion requirements and design, benchmarking, use of a priori information databases, imagery classifiers and their fusion, reasoning frameworks, neural networks, fuzzy logic, reasoning techniques for identification (Bayes, Dempster-Shafer, and Dezert-Smarandache), SAR image processing, situation, threat and intent assessment, distributed information fusion and dynamic resource management, amongst others. Dr. Valin has been involved in information fusion from its early stages and is now President of the International Society of Information Fusion (ISIF), which holds annual conferences (the one in Montréal in 2001 was co-organized by him and Elisa Shahbazian, and he is actively involved in the 2007 one in Québec).