Keynote speakers

Prof. Sankar Kumar Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, India.  

Web: http://www.isical.ac.in/~sankar/

Bio: Sankar K. Pal is a Distinguished Scientist and former Director of Indian Statistical Institute. He is also a J.C. Bose Fellow of the Govt. of India and former INAE Chair Professor. 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 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, the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) - for the Advancement of Science in Developing Countries, International Association for Pattern recognition, International Association of Fuzzy Systems, and all the four National Academies for Science/Engineering in India. He is a co-author of nineteen 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 visited about forty countries as a Keynote/ Invited speaker or an academic visitor. He has received the 1990 S.S. Bhatnagar Prize (which is the most coveted award for a scientist in India), 2013 Padma Shri (one of the highest civilian awards) 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, 1995 NASA Patent Application Award (USA), 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 Government of India, 2013 Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) Chair Professorship, IETE Diamond Jubilee Medal 2013, IEEE Fellow Class Golden Jubilee Medal 2014, and INAE S.N. Mitra Award 2015. 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 (1993-2011), Int. J. Pattern Recognition & Artificial Intelligence, Applied Intelligence, Information Sciences, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Fundamenta Informaticae, LNCS Trans. Rough Sets, Int. J. Computational Intelligence and Applications, IET Image Processing, and J. Intelligent Information Systems; 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, and Int. Journal of Approximate Reasoning; and a Guest Editor of IEEE Computer, IEEE SMC and Theoretical Computer Science.

Dr. Abbas Cheddad, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Web: www.abbascheddad.net

Bio: Abbas Cheddad is currently working as a senior lecturer at the department of computer science and engineering, the Blekinge Institute of Technology inSweden. Prior to this, he was a researcher at the Umeå University (Umeå Centre for Molecular Medicine, Sweden) andthe KarolinskaInstitutet (Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Stockholm). He obtained his PhD with a distinction award from the Intelligent Systems Research Centre at the University of Ulster, United Kingdom, in 2010. Dr. Cheddad’s research interests fall into the following interlinked topics:Computer vision, 3D reconstruction and Optical projection tomography, Steganography, Medical image analysis, Quantitative imaging bio-markers, Pattern localisation and recognition, Characterization and validation of imaging bio-markers, Evaluation of the association between image-based phenotypes and genomic biomarkers, algorithms for the computer-guided analysis of multi-dimensional microscopy-data sets, Computational support for tissue-related target/ biomarker discovery, development and analysis, and machine learning applications. Dr. Cheddad is the co-founderand one of theshareholders of HidInImage, a University spin-out company based in the UK. This initiative is trying to exploit our patented technology and encryption methods which enable the encryption and embedding of secret information (text or images) inside other multimedia files using Steganography techniques. Our award winning Steganography-based hiding solution plays a vital role in securing digital media content. HidInImage won the Hi-Tech category at the Belfast 25K Investment awards, 2009. As for professional memberships, Dr. Cheddad is a member of IEEE Society and IEEE Communication Society, the Swedish Society for Automated Image Analysis, the Swedish Bioimagingand the Swedish e.Science Research Centre (SERC). He is a frequent reviewer for major journals in the field such as: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Signal Processing and Signal Processing: Image Communication, to name a few. He has 1485 citations in total distributed unevenly among 19 Journal papers, 27 conference papers, a Book, a book chapter (invited) and 3 patents.

Prof. Faisal Shafait, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), Pakistan.

Web: https://tukl.seecs.nust.edu.pk/members/faisal_shafait.html 

Bio: Faisal Shafait is currently working as a Professor at School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. Besides, Previously, He was an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at The University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia. He was also a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as well as an Adjunct Lecturer at Kaiserslautern University of Technology (TUKL), Germany. He received his PhD with the highest distinction in computer engineering from TUKL in 2008. His research interests include machine learning and pattern recognition with a special emphasis on applications in document image analysis. He has co-authored over 100 publications in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals in this area. His Google Scholar Profile shows over 5,500 citations of their papers.