For propelling biometric discoveries and supporting the rising-stars and innovators of tomorrow, Anil Jain of Michigan State University has received an honorary doctorate of engineering from the renowned Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

Jain is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MSU. He was awarded the Doctor of Engineering honoris causa by HKUST, a public research university that is considered one of the world’s highest ranked young universities. In 2018, Jain was conferred Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

“Dr. Jain’s groundbreaking contributions to the field of biometrics are indeed indelible,” said MSU Provost Teresa K. Woodruff, Ph.D. “Michigan State University is proud of the impressive scope and impact of his academic achievements and grateful for his mentorship of the next generation of scholars.”

Leo Kempel, dean of the MSU College of Engineering, said an honorary doctorate is the highest honor a university can bestow – and is done in recognition of significant contributions to both the academic community and society as a whole.

“This recognition of Anil Jain’s career contributions by a peer-institution is an indication of the extraordinary global impact of his work,” Kempel said. “He not only has been responsible for numerous discoveries over his career, but he has also educated a generation of scholars who themselves are making an impact in this important field. Given the connectivity of our modern society, authentication of identity has never been more important,” Kempel added.

The following is the honorary degree citation presented during ceremonies in Hong Kong on Friday, Nov. 26, 2021:

Next time you open your mobile device with a simple touch of your finger, think of Professor Anil K. Jain, whom we honor today. It is Professor Jain’s seminal research in pattern recognition, machine learning, and computer vision that have helped bring biometric systems into everyday use on phones and laptops, and at border control points, among many other applications.

The world-renowned biometric guru is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, where he has remained for over 45 years. However, during this time, his curiosity and passion for exploration have seen him journey far and wide in his achievements.

Hailing originally from Lucknow in India, Professor Jain was schooled in the 1950s and 1960s to follow his grandfather, father, and uncles into engineering. He entered the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, with an annual intake at the time of just 300 students. But with the computer age starting to unfold, rather than civil engineering, which would probably lead to a civil service job like his father, he selected a degree in electrical engineering.

Next came inspiring Master’s and PhD studies at Ohio State University in the early 1970s, leading to a doctoral thesis focused on the curse of dimensionality in statistical pattern recognition. While there, Professors Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran and Robert McGhee instilled both the joys of theoretical discovery and how to apply cutting-edge results to real-world projects. In 1974, Professor Jain joined Michigan State University.

Over the following 15 years, he deepened his expertise in pattern recognition and image processing, publishing and presenting well-received papers, and spurring interest in the area among his students. Then in the early 1990s, a fortuitous out-of-the-blue phone call from a fellow professor in Washington, D.C., opened the way to a transformational change for Professor Jain and society at large.

The caller was in search of a civilian application for a newly designed piece of computer hardware for the National Security Agency: a field programmable gate array processor. After brainstorming on the machine’s merits, especially its image enhancement capabilities, Professor Jain and his research team hit on the idea of improving fingerprint recognition — images that are often blurred or of poor quality when captured.

The groundbreaking work that resulted went on to offer a complete solution to enhanced automated fingerprint recognition by combining a point-matching algorithm based on minutiae points — the major features of a fingerprint image — and a more advanced texture-matching technology, capturing the texture characteristics of a fingerprint with a set of filters. The approach, which led to six U.S. patents, significantly boosted recognition speed and accuracy, especially for small fingerprint sensors, such as those now used for our mobiles.

Such useful advances also attracted burgeoning societal interest, with fingerprint recognition evolving into one of the most widely used biometric technologies today in a sector now encompassing iris, face, voice and speech recognition systems and a global market that topped U.S. $25 billion in 2020.

Although Professor Jain has chosen to follow his heart and remain in academia, over the years he has worked collaboratively with many major corporations, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and UN World Food Programme, which resulted in a fingerprint-based infant ID system. He has additionally greatly contributed to his country of birth, in particular through his involvement in Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric national identification system covering over 1.3 billion people.

At the same time, Professor Jain has powered forward in academic impact, with a Google Scholar h-index of 200 and total citations topping 230,000. His list of honors and accolades is equally impressive, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001) and membership of the National Academy of Engineering (2016) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019).

Meanwhile, a passion for knowledge-sharing through conferences, books, and media interviews, along with a personal love of travel and a highly personable character, have taken Professor Jain across the world as a keynote speaker, educational advisor, and visiting professor. Such overseas expeditions included HKUST, where he spent a month in the 1990s collaborating on computer vision and machine learning with the then relatively new Department of Computer Science.

Propelling forward biometric discovery and applications, making the field accessible by discussing its capabilities and limitations with diverse audiences, and serving as a mentor and friend to the field’s rising-star academics and company innovators, Professor Jain has indelibly made a difference to society overall.

Chancellor, on behalf of the Council of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, I have the high honor of presenting to you Professor Anil K. Jain, University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, for the award of Doctor of Engineering honoris causa.

Full story is from the College of Engineering.