About

Carey Rappaport is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. His research focuses on advanced robotics, particularly in developing autonomous systems that can perform energy-efficiency tasks in challenging environments. He is involved in projects such as the development of robots capable of inspecting and sealing inaccessible spaces in residential buildings to improve energy conservation and reduce heating and cooling costs. Rappaport's work emphasizes the integration of sensor fusion, control systems, and human-robot interaction to create practical robotic solutions for real-world applications. He is also a faculty advisor for initiatives like the American-Made E-ROBOT Prize, which aims to demonstrate the potential of robotics in building efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Optics
• Acoustics
• Telecommunications
• Physics
• Computer Security
• Remote sensing
• Geology
• Computer vision

Selected publications

• Semantic Segmentation on FDFD-generated Wideband Radar Images of Potential Shooters

  The Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Journal (ACES) · 2025-01-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper presents a deep learning model for fast and accurate radar detection and pixel-level localization of large concealed metallic weapons on pedestrians walking along a sidewalk. The considered radar is stationary, with a multi-beam antenna operating at 30 GHz with 6 GHz bandwidth. A large modeled data set has been generated by running 2155 2D-FDFD simulations of torso cross sections of persons walking toward the radar in various scenarios.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• INCULCATING AND FOSTERING LEADERSHIP SKILLS FOR TODAY'S ENGINEERS - THE GORDON ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP PROGRAM AT NORTHESTERN UNIVERSITY

  2025-04-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Gaps in engineering education, perception of career tracks, and demographics associated with cyclical hiring practices have insufficiently educated the engineering workforce, most critically in training technical leaders capable of competently bringing a product to market. The traditional leadership path using apprenticeships, mentoring, and gradually increasing responsibility in running progressively larger teams, is heavily dependent upon opportunity. The perfect alignment of these opportunities to lead, and availability of talented engineers who are ready to lead rarely occurs in today’s lean corporate environment. Hence in many cases, high potential employees are put in positions to lead, beyond what their level of genuine experience has prepared them for. Engineering executives have estimated that when relatively unseasoned engineers are tasked to run their first team or project, nearly 80% fail in satisfying all of the project’s critical requirements, either missing on functionality, performance, quality, time-tomarket, cost or other key objectives. The Gordon Engineering Leadership Program at Northeastern University targets the key soft skills, organizational awareness, and technical agility to accelerate the development of leadership skills in an engineering environment. Started with a grant bestowed by Dr. Bernard Gordon the program actively works with over 20 industry partners in honing the key knowledge, skills and attitudes essential in accelerating the building of a new generation of game-changing engineering leaders. The program consists of class work in scientific foundations and in engineering leadership – to establish solid background of technical tools for general appreciation of engineering solution approaches, and to provide project management tools for leading teams and effectively attaining goals – and the Challenge Project, which is a master’s thesis-equivalent tightly-scheduled, deliverable-oriented demonstration of human and material resource management and engineering problem solving. A growing consortium with programs at other major universities is working to advance and share research, curricula and best practices in this area.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Focused Millimeter-Wave Ablation Optimization to Treat Severe Asthma

  2025-07-13

  articleSenior author

  We suggest a novel means of treating severe asthma by ablating excessive muscle tissue that surrounds and constricts bronchiole, using catheter-based focused millimeter waves. Because of the limited aperture, the best focusing appears to be to establish destructive interference at intervening healthy tissue while maintaining therapeutic power deposition at the deeper muscle tissue. Additionally, we use a computational approach (FDFD) to target electromagnetic field cancellation at a frequency of 110 GHz. Our model utilizes a tactically placed metal ellipse partnered with a discretized representation of tissue-types derived from a histological cross-section to optimize field propagation and cancellation at its focal point. The results demonstrate over 40% reduction in power at the healthy lung tissue boundary, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(x, y)=(2.6,3.38) \text{mm}$</tex>, due to destructive interference, while increasing power by 2% at the smooth muscle tissue boundary, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(x, y)=(2.6,3.6) \text{mm}$</tex>, demonstrative of selective ablation. Our calculated ellipse placement effectively suppresses the real part of the field, with up to 19.4% cancellation in the magnitude field at the lung boundary, whereas the imaginary part remains largely the same as without the ellipse. The selective destructive interference minimizes unwanted damage to healthy tissue, without any compromise of the therapeutic effect in the high-conductivity unhealthy muscle regions. The work provides a foundation for future developments in electromagnetic ablation therapies and introduces a framework for further integration of computational techniques within the biomedical space.

  PublisherDOI

• Pixel-Wise Localization of Concealed Objects on Millimeter-Wave Radar Images Using Deep Learning

  IEEE Transactions on Radar Systems · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  Automatic detection and localization of anomalies on radar images of personnel taken at the airport security checkpoints is a necessary step of having an end-to-end automatic threat detection algorithm. This article presents two deep learning-based solutions for pixel-wise localization of body-worn anomalies. The trained 2-D and semi-supervised U-Net models can accurately detect and localize foreign objects on all body regions by producing anomaly and body masks for each input radar image.

  PublisherDOI

• A Wideband Reflector-based Mm-Wave/THz Nearfield Line Scanner for Rapidly Sensing Materials in Envelopes

  2024-03-17 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  For non-invasive detection of illicit materials arriving at postal facilities, it is important to be able to rapidly scan envelopes. Illegal drugs, shipped in thin packages, can be identified based on form factor (pills) or wideband sub-terahertz frequency signature. To image efficiently the contents of an envelope, a millimeter-wave or sub-terahertz signal can be focused to a small spot on the surface of the package. This provides sufficient intensity and resolution to both penetrate and distinguish the shapes of the contents. To be practical, the beam would have to scan the entire envelope surface on the fly. A flying beam scanner is developed that makes use of a wideband focusing reflector with a small physically rotating feed. The novel shaped reflector scans focal spots along a straight line at the surface of the envelope, sensing in one dimension. It is assumed that the envelope moves on a conveyer belt in the perpendicular direction. The line scanning time is limited by the mechanical rotation speed of the small feed, which does not have to reverse direction or accelerate. Thus, a line scan can be accomplished in ∼0.01 sec., and the entire envelope could be scanned in less than 1/5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> second (or 18,000 per hour).

  PublisherDOI

• Unbalanced-Fed TCDA Performance Improvement Using a Scan Impedance Model

  IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation · 2024-06-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Unbalanced-fed Tightly-Coupled Dipole Arrays (TCDAs) allow for the realization of ultrawideband, wide-scanning phased arrays without the need for baluns, which may increase size, weight, and cost. However, unbalanced-fed TCDAs often have additional radiating modes and common-mode resonances which may degrade performance. In this paper, a scan impedance model is presented which describes performance in terms of a combination of even and odd monopole and dipole radiating modes. An intermodal coupling term is included to account for performance when scanning in the E-plane. Each mode is calculated individually in a full-wave solver and the model is then validated by comparing the proposed combination to a full simulation of the unbalanced-fed TCDA. A coaxial extension technique is then introduced to increase the impedance of the monopole-like radiating even mode, allowing the unbalanced-fed array to match the performance of the balanced-fed version without shorting posts or significant redesign of the elements or lattice.

  PublisherDOI

• Fast, Fully-Automatic Characterization of Metallic and Water-Based Threat Objects for Millimeter-Wave Personnel Screening Systems

  IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation · 2023-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Efficient characterization of concealed person-worn objects enhances the security of air travel and reduces the inspection time. Mm-wave nearfield radar can detect metallic objects such as guns or knives, as well as water-based materials that might be associated with peroxide threats. However, it cannot discriminate these potential threats from benign objects to decrease the nuisance alarm rate. Moreover, distinguishing these potential threats from benign objects in the presence of human skin is even more challenging. The authors have previously developed a method using mm-wave imaging to estimate the nominal body contour (NBC) with attached objects. This paper extends the image-processing-based algorithm to identify concealed metallic and water-based objects, as thin as 1 cm, attached to arms, legs, torso, and the pelvic region. The algorithm determines if the anomaly in the image is due to lossless or conductive material seen respectively as a depression or protrusion relative to the NBC. Next, high-loss water-based objects are distinguished from metallic and benign low-loss objects. The developed method is verified experimentally via actual images of human subjects, with foreign attached objects of various types and sizes. The images were captured by the High Definition-Advanced Imaging Technology (HD-AIT) scanner, a laboratory prototype system developed recently by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The developed codes resulted in zero miss and 7% rate of false alarm, while the rest of objects were either characterized correctly or referred to for a secondary pat down. Our method is performed fully-automatically and within a few seconds.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sidelobe Suppression by Optimizing Receiver Positions via PSF-Based Multi-Objective Optimization

  2023-03-26 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Optimized Dual Frequency, Wideband Millimeter-Wave Antenna Array for Next Generation Advanced Imaging Technology

  2023-03-26 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In this paper, a dual frequency, wideband antenna array is designed by combining a high frequency subarray with a low frequency subarray. The image of the dual frequency array is obtained by multiplying the images of the two subarrays. The PSF analysis and the system imaging simulation show that the grating lobes are significantly reduced for the dual frequency array with fewer radar modules/elements than the conventional array. This design will make the new generation system superior to the conventional scanning system.

  PublisherDOI

• Improvements on Low-Loss Material Characterization Based on Wideband Radar Image Processing

  2023-07-23

  articleSenior author

  Distinguishing benign materials from potential hazards is an essential step in speeding up the personnel screening process in airports. In our previous works [1], [2], we have introduced an automatic algorithm for characterizing lossless and lossy materials. This paper proposes a method for having a more accurate characterization algorithm by automatically tuning the algorithm parameters for lossless, low-loss, and lossy mediums. The approach is applied to a previously developed algorithm. Having the location of the body-worn object on the 2D reconstructed radar cross-section, we predict the nominal body contour, and find an approximate location for the front and back surface responses caused by the presence of the attached object. Next, we search for the more dominant response and tune the characterization algorithm's thresholds based on this feature. Tuning the algorithm parameters based on intensity of features seen on the image helps improve the characterization result for low-loss materials.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Borja González-Valdés

  Universidade de Vigo

  56 shared

• José Á. Martínez-Lorenzo

  47 shared

• Fernando Las‐Heras

  Universidad de Oviedo

  36 shared

• Ann W. Morgenthaler

  Northeastern University

  35 shared

• Yuri Álvarez

  Universidad de Oviedo

  32 shared

• Eric L. Miller

  31 shared

• José Ángel Martínez-Lorenzo

  Northeastern University

  26 shared

• A.G. Pino

  Universidade de Vigo

  21 shared

Labs

• Carey RappaportPI

Education

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1984

• M.S., Electrical Engineering

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1980

• B.S., Electrical Engineering

  University of California, Berkeley

  1979

Awards & honors

• Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• IEEE Distinguished Lecturer–Antennas and Propagation
• Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award
• best paper award (European Conference on Antennas and Propag…