BIO
Anil Jain (Basti, India, 1948) holds an MS degree (1970) and PhD (1973) in electrical engineering from Ohio State University. In 1974 he took up a position at Michigan State University, where he has spent his entire career and is now a University Distinguished Professor. Author of almost 300 published papers and fifteen books, including Introduction to Biometrics, Handbook of Face Recognition, Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition and Algorithms for Clustering Data, he also has a dozen patents to his name and has served as editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and associate editor of several other journals. Jain has been an Amazon Scholar since 2021, and has held visiting appointments at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (India), Korea University, ETH Zurich and IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. He is a member of the U.S. National Academies study on “Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance.”
CONTRIBUTION
After studying in his native India, Anil Jain began his research career at Michigan State University working on automated systems able to distinguish whether a military plane in the air was the enemy’s or “one of ours.” From there he went on to study questions like how to detect signs of disease in medical images, or how to use a computer to recognize the destination address of postal mail. But none of these applications of the underlying technique of pattern recognition took him as far as his work on fingerprint and face recognition, where he has become a world-leading authority.
In the 1970s, the awardee was looking at how to group data in the most illustrative way, a technique known as clustering. There were plenty of algorithms around that could do this, but none of them dealt with what he considered to be the key issue: how to check whether the result of the clustering algorithm made actual sense, i.e., whether the categories it found were meaningful. Jain not only devised a means to validate this type of algorithm, but also proposed ways to accurately visualize such data clusters.
It was in light of this work that he received a call from a colleague in the 1990s in search of a civil application for an apparatus designed by the U.S. National Security Agency. On exploring the possibilities of this new machine, Jain soon realized that it could serve to identify matches between two fingerprints some 100 times faster than any previous method. That finding would produce six patents and, in time, Jain’s group would come to lead the world in fingerprint recognition.
This technology, now in wide use in the touch ID features of our mobile phones and as a forensic tool in criminal investigations, has also been key to developing an identification system for the population of India, which until less than two decades ago did not have a unified registry of citizens. In 2009, Jain worked with the Indian Government to set up a reliable system that would allow all citizens to access social and banking services and to exercise their right to vote, while respecting the privacy of users. “Political parties have come and gone,” the new laureate remarks, “but they all believe in the system and have kept it going.”
Jain was also a pioneer in quantifying the uniqueness of a person’s fingerprints. Though no one thought it possible, he was able to demonstrate that the tiny distortion caused by the tip of a finger being pressed against a surface gave rise to the slight probability that two people’s fingerprints could be misidentified as the same. “The resulting article, which we published in 2002, changed the perspective of forensic agencies, who could no longer take for granted that each person’s prints were unique.”
The awardee also looked at the stability or persistence of fingerprints over time, providing first-time confirmation with solid data of this popular belief. To do so, he used a data set of 40,000 repeat offenders stretching over 12 years, during which their fingerprints were taken on each occasion they were arrested. What he found lent substance to the unproven conjecture that they do not change over time.
“This is a well-deserved award, because Anil Jain is clearly the father of fingerprint recognition, and one of the fathers of iris recognition. Within the field of face recognition, he has sought and found solutions to frontier problems due to changes in lighting or appearance and the effects of aging,” adds Javier Ortega García, Professor of Signal Theory and Communications and Director of the Digital Transformation School at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, who has worked with the awardee over various research stays in his laboratory.
