EAST LANSING – A $400,000 cash gift will honor
one of the world’s foremost authorities on pattern recognition, computer
vision, and biometric recognition with the creation of an endowed fund in his
name at Michigan State University.
The Anil K. Jain Endowed Graduate Fellowship is an anonymous gift from an
international businessman who was a visiting scholar in computer graphics and
image processing in Jain’s laboratory in the early 1980s. The fellowship fund
will support doctoral-level research on pattern recognition, computer vision,
and biometric recognition.
Jain is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at MSU, who has conducted trailblazing research in data clustering,
fingerprint recognition and face recognition. His research is followed by his
peers as indicated by his h-index which is the highest among active computer
science researchers in the world today. The h-index measures the productivity
and citation impact of a scientist or scholar’s published body of work.
“I am so very grateful that a former student has chosen to honor me by
establishing this endowment,” Jain said. “I am flattered that our time together
at MSU was so meaningful to him.”
Leo Kempel, dean of the MSU College of Engineering, said, “We are delighted
someone has chosen to honor Dr. Jain’s long and meritorious service in this
way.”
Jain’s research articles on biometrics have appeared in Scientific American,
Nature, IEEE Spectrum, Scholarpedia, and MIT Technology Review.
He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, the
Humboldt Research award, a Fulbright fellowship, the IEEE Computer Society
Technical Achievement award (2003), the W. Wallace McDowell award (2007), the
IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize (2008), and the ICDM 2008 Research Contribution Award.
He holds six patents and is the author of several books.
The $400,000 gift is part of the Michigan State University’s Empower
Extraordinary Campaign.
