This blogpost was authored by Dr Josiane Zerubia from the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, France. Dr Zerubia visited the University of Bristol in Summer 2025 to collaborate with Professor Alin Achim on a Benjamin Meaker award.
When I arrived in Bristol at the beginning of July, 2025 I was astonished to discover a very sunny and joyful city where lots of students attended their graduation ceremony. After a few days I was used to it and started to really be involved in my research work on Learning Stochastic Geometry Models for Ship Identification in Synthetic Aperture Radar Images with Prof. Alin Achim, who hosted me in his lab at the School of Computer Science.
Over the last few decades there has been a growing interest in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging on account of its importance in applications such as mapping, search and rescue, and target recognition and tracking. Modern SAR systems can produce high quality pictures of the Earth’s surface while avoiding some of the shortcomings of other forms of remote imagining systems, like limitations during nighttime and seeing through cloud cover. Its value also extends to areas like marine spatial planning and habitat restoration. In maritime applications, accurate analytics of SAR provides key information for tracking (illegal commercial activities) vessels for instance.
I also interacted regularly with Prof. Achim as well as the postdocs and PhD students from his lab through more general discussions and demos. The topics of the discussions were about signal and image processing techniques and AI with applications to SAR remote sensing and medical or biomedical imaging.
Finally, during the month of July, I stayed at Principal’s House which is a very nice and convenient place to live, close to Merchant Venturers Building where Prof. Achim is located and close to Park street where there are many shops and restaurants.
In the future, it would be great to stay there again and to continue to work in collaboration with Prof. Achim and his team.
