Professor Anil Kumar Jain (right), a close friend of HKBU, is one of the four distinguished persons awarded Honorary Doctoral Degree from HKBU this year.
In today’s Honorary Doctoral Degree Conferment Ceremony, Professor Anil Kumar Jain was conferred Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the University for his contributions to pattern recognition, computer vision and biometric recognition, being one of the four distinguished persons awarded the honorary doctoral degrees, alongside biologist Timothy Mitchison, entrepreneur Chloe Suen Yin-wah and author Olga Tokarczuk. Despite being unable to be physically present in the Ceremony, the renowned computer scientist joined the special occasion online via Zoom.
Currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, Professor Jain has received a long list of international awards, such as the W. Wallace McDowell Award — the highest honour awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Research Award, and the IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Science.
Hailing from Uttar Pradesh, India, Professor Jain is the author of some of the most influential books in the computer science world, such as Encyclopaedia of Biometrics, the Handbook of Face Recognition and the Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition. He has published over 280 papers and his citation impact is the highest among computer scientists around the globe. He also holds over a handful of patents. While all his patents have been licensed to different companies, most of them are apparatus and methods for recognising fingerprints.
Professor Jain has been a long-time friend of the Department and the University. Back in 2007, he made his first visit to the University for a talk on pattern recognition. From 2014 to 2019, the celebrated scholar returned several times, sharing his research findings and collaborating with our students and the faculty. Professor Jain also served as a Departmental Academic Advisor in the strategic development of the Department from 2015 to 2018.
On November 30, Professor Jain will deliver an online Distinguished Lecture on “Fingerprint Recognition” organised by the Faculty of Science, presenting how new machine learning and artificial intelligence models are being used to address some of these challenges and to push the state of the art in fingerprint recognition. The Department also looks forward to more research collaborations with Professor Jain and being inspired by his groundbreaking research ideas in the future.
