Campus Digest

Professor Anil Jain delivers Honorary Doctorate Distinguished Lecture

Monday, 12 December 2022

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Professor Anil Jain (on screen) and the HKBU representatives at the lecture, including (from left to right) Professor Yuen Pong-chi, Associate Dean of Science (Teaching and Learning); Dr Chen Li, Associate Head (Research) of the Department of Computer Science; Professor Xu Jianliang, Head and Professor of Computer Science; Professor Liu Jiming, Associate Vice-President (Research Development) and Dean of Science; Professor Alexander Wai, President and Vice-Chancellor; Professor Rick Wong, Interim Provost and Acting Vice-President (Research and Development); Professor William Cheung, Associate Vice-President (Undergraduate Programmes); and Professor Byron Choi Koon-kau, Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) of the Department of Computer Science.
Professor Jain uses Hong Kong identity cards to illustrate how fingerprints improve security and make our daily lives more convenient.
Participants are inspired by Professor Jain’s talk.

 

The Faculty of Science held the Honorary Doctorate Distinguished Lecture entitled “Fingerprint Recognition” by Professor Anil Jain, a renowned computer scientist, on 30 November. It was attended by around 170 academics, students and friends of the University.

In his welcoming speech, Professor Alexander Wai, President and Vice-Chancellor, recognised Professor Jain’s outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and technology. He said: “Professor Jain has conducted research in the areas of biometrics, pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision, and image processing that has had an impact on our daily lives.”

Professor Jain illustrated how fingerprints improve security and make our lives more convenient, using the example of Hong Kong identity cards. He said that the use of fingerprint recognition has become mainstream and widespread in many aspects of daily life, such as access control, unlocking mobile phones, and immigration. However, he stressed that fingerprint recognition remains a challenge due to its unique requirements, including the huge number of distinct and dynamic classes and the need for extremely high accuracy. Professor Jain also discussed the further development of automated fingerprint recognition with machine learning.

Professor Jain is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University in the USA. He was conferred the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, by HKBU in November 2022.

Please click here for further details of the lecture.