Prof. Anil K. Jain is an Indian-American computer scientist and a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Statistics & Probability at Michigan State University. He is one of the key men behind a radical new technology that has built the world's first-ever three-dimensional fingerprint technology. He has also licensed technologies of interest to organizations and agencies. Honoring his academic excellence and accomplishments, IIT Kanpur conferred upon him the prestigious Distinguished Alumnus Award 2017.
Prof. Jain received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1969, and an MS and a PhD degree in 1970 and 1973, respectively, from the Ohio State University, USA. While pursuing his studies, he simultaneously worked as a Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of EE at the university, from 1969 to 1972. In 1972, he joined the Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and worked there for two years. Following it, he moved to the Michigan State University. He is currently a University Distinguished Professor. He has also been an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University and a WCU Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Korea University. In 1997, he was conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Ohio State University
Prof. Jain works in the areas of pattern recognition, computer vision, data clustering, texture analysis, document image understanding, machine learning and biometric recognition. He has licensed technologies of interest to forensics and law enforcement agencies to Safran Morpho and NEC Corp: (i) Tattoo-ID for matching tattoo images (2012), (ii) AltFinger-ID for detecting whether a fingerprint image has been altered (2013), (iii) Face Sketch-ID for matching facial sketches to mugshot images (2014) and (iv) Face-Search for locating a person of interest in databases with hundreds of millions of faces (2015). He has won the 30+ Best Paper Awards and authored several popular books, including
Prof. Jain is a recipient of several fellowships. He has also served as an Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1991-1994); a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2016); and a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE).