National Science Chair, Government of India; President, Indian Statistical Institute
Sankar K Pal is a National Science Chair, SERB, Govt. of India, and an Emeritus Professor and the President of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). He is a Distinguished Scientist and former Director of Indian Statistical Institute, a former Distinguished Professor of Indian National Science Academy, and a former Chair Professor of Indian National Academy of Engineering. Currently, he is also an AICTE Distinguished Chair Professor, and a Scholar-in-Residence of IIT Jodhpur, India. He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility in the Institute in Calcutta. He received a Ph.D. in Radio Physics and Electronics from the University of Calcutta in 1979, and another Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering along with DIC from Imperial College, University of London in 1982. He joined his Institute ISI in 1975 as a CSIR Senior Research Fellow where he became a Full Professor in 1987, Distinguished Scientist in 1998, the Director for the term 2005-2010, and the President for the term 2022-2024. He was the first Computer scientist and someone outside Statistics and Mathematics to become the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute since its inception in 1931. He is also the first Ex-employee of ISI to get elected to hold the honorable Chair of President of ISI after its inception in 1931. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Maryland, College Park in 1986-87; the NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas in 1990-92 & 1994; and in US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC in 2004. Since 1997 he has served as a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (USA) for the Asia-Pacific Region, and held several visiting positions in Italy, Poland, Hong Kong and Australian universities. Prof. Pal is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), International Association for Pattern recognition, International Association of Fuzzy Systems, Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association, and all the four National Academies for Science/Engineering in India. He is a Foreign Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has coauthored 21 books, about 500 research papers and 2 US patents in the areas of pattern recognition and machine learning, image/video processing, data mining, web intelligence, soft computing, bioinformatics, and cognitive machines. Prof. Pal has made fundamental contributions to machine intelligence research by developing various modern approaches. He pioneered the development of fuzzy set theory, and neuro-fuzzy and rough-fuzzy computing, in general, and their applications in pattern recognition, image processing, machine learning, knowledge-based systems, and data mining, in particular. He is the one who introduced the Soft Computing concept and research in India. He visited forty-five countries as a Keynote/ Invited speaker or an academic visitor. He has received the 1990 S.S. Bhatnagar Prize, 2013 Padma by the President of India and many prestigious awards in India and abroad including the 1999 G.D. Birla Award, 1998 Om Bhasin Award, 1993 Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, 2000 Khwarizmi International Award from the President of Iran, 2000-2001 FICCI Award, 1993 Vikram Sarabhai Research Award, 1993 NASA Tech Brief Award (USA), 1994 IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award, 1997 IETE-R.L. Wadhwa Gold Medal, 2001 INSA-S.H. Zaheer Medal, 2005-06 Indian Science Congress-P.C. Mahalanobis Birth Centenary Gold Medal from the Prime Minister of India for Lifetime Achievement, 2007 J.C. Bose Fellowship of the Govt. of India, 2013 INAE Chair Professorship, 2015 DAE Raja Ramanna Fellowship, 2015 INAE-S.N. Mitra Award, 2017 INSA-Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Lecture Award, 2018 INSA Distinguished Professorial Chair, 2020 National Science Chair, Govt. of India, and 2021 AICTE Distinguished Chair Professor. Prof. Pal has served/serving in editorial board of ~30 internationally well-known scientific journals in computer science and engineering including several IEEE Transactions. His Google Scholar h-index is 83 with 35,000+ total citations.
Biography: Janet M. Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton and Visiting Professor of the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, Birmingham City University, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of Australasia, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism and transculturalism. Recently she has coedited The Diaspora Studies Reader (Routledge, 2017), the volumes, Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (2020), and “Katherine Mansfield: The Gift of Breath” (2020), a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature. In addition are two special issues of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing: one with Om Prakash Dwivedi and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, on “Planetary Precarity and the Pandemic” (2020) and another on “New Zealand and the Globalization of Culture” (2020) with Paloma Fresno Calleja She has also edited The General and the Nightingale: The War Stories of Dan Davin (Otago University Press, 2020). She is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the series, Studies in World Literature (Ibidem-Verlag), chair of Challenging Precarity: A Global Network, and from 2020-22 was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Diaspora Screen Media Network. In 2022-23 she is Fellow-in-Residence at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, UK.
Vincenzo Piuri has received his Ph.D. in computer engineering at Polytechnic of Milan, Italy (1989). He is Full Professor in computer engineering at the University of Milan, Italy (since 2000). He has been Associate Professor at Polytechnic of Milan, Italy and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and visiting researcher at George Mason University, USA.
His main research interests are in artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, intelligent systems, machine learning, pattern analysis and recognition, signal and image processing, biometrics, intelligent measurement systems, industrial applications, digital processing architectures, fault tolerance, cloud computing infrastructures, and internet-of-things. Original results have been published in 400+ papers in international journals, proceedings of international conferences, books, and book chapters.
He is Fellow of the IEEE, Distinguished Scientist of ACM, and Senior Member of INNS. He is IEEE Region 8 Director (2023-24) and has been IEEE Vice President for Technical Activities (2015), IEEE Director, President of the IEEE Systems Council, President of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Vice President for Education of the IEEE Biometrics Council, Vice President for Publications of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society and the IEEE Systems Council, and Vice President for Membership of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
He has been Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Systems Journal (2013-19). He is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing and has been Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, and IEEE Access.
He received the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Technical Award (2002), the IEEE TAB Hall of Honor (2019), and the Rudolf Kalman Professor Title of the Obuda University, Hungary.
