Sankar K. Pal is a Distinguished
Scientist of the Indian Statistical Institute and a former Director. He is also
a J.C. Bose Fellow of the Govt. of 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 in 1975 as a CSIR Senior Research Fellow where
he later became a Full Professor in 1987, Distinguished Scientist in 1998 and the Director
for the term 2005-10.
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 been serving 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, USA,
the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), Italy, International Association
for Pattern recognition, USA, International Association of Fuzzy Systems, USA, and all the
four National Academies for Science/Engineering in India. He is a co-author of seventeen
books and more than four hundred research publications in the areas of Pattern Recognition
and Machine Learning, Image Processing, Data Mining and Web Intelligence, Soft Computing,
Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, Fuzzy Sets, Rough Sets and Bioinformatics.
He has received the 1990 S.S. Bhatnagar
Prize (which is the most coveted award for a scientist in 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 Islamic Republic 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 (USA), 1995 NASA Patent Application Award
(USA), 1997 IETE-R.L. Wadhwa Gold Medal, the 2001 INSA-S.H. Zaheer Medal,
2005-06 Indian Science Congress-P.C. Mahalanobis Birth Centenary Award (Gold Medal) for
Lifetime Achievement, 2007 J.C. Bose Fellowship of the Government of India and 2008 Vigyan Ratna Award from Science &
Culture Organization, West Bengal.
Prof. Pal is/ was an Associate Editor
of IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2002-06), IEEE Trans. Neural
Networks [1994-98 & 2003-06], Neurocomputing (1995-2005), Pattern Recognition Letters,
Int. J. Pattern Recognition & Artificial Intelligence, Applied Intelligence,
Information Sciences, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Fundamenta Informaticae, LNCS Trans. On
Rough Sets, Int. J. Computational Intelligence and Applications, IET Image Processing, J.
Intelligent Information Systems, and Proc. INSA-A; Editor-in-Chief,
Int. J. Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition; a Book Series Editor, Frontiers in Artificial
Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, and Statistical Science and Interdisciplinary
Research, World Scientific; a Member,
Executive Advisory Editorial Board, IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Systems, Int. Journal on Image
and Graphics, Int. J. Computational Science & Engineering, and Int. Journal of
Approximate Reasoning; and Guest Editor, IEEE Computer, and Theoretical Computer
Science - C..
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