Sankar Kumar Pal

He is also the first ex-employee of ISI being elected to hold the honorable chair of President of ISI since its inception in 1931.

His areas of research interests include pattern recognition, machine intelligence, image processing, data mining, granular computing, fuzzy sets and uncertainty analysis, artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, rough sets, and soft computing with applications such as in bioinformatics, video analytics, online social network analysis, and cognitive mind development.

He has pioneered hybrid intelligent systems like neuro fuzzy and rough fuzzy hybridization.

Sankar Kumar Pal (born 1950) is a computer scientist and the President (& former Director) of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata.

He is also a National Science Chair, Government of India.

Prof. Pal is a computer scientist with an international reputation on pattern recognition, image processing, fuzzy neural network, rough fuzzy hybridization, soft computing, granular mining, and machine intelligence.

He pioneered the development of fuzzy set theory, and neuro-fuzzy and rough-fuzzy computing for uncertainty modelling with demonstration in pattern recognition, image processing, machine learning, knowledge-based systems and data mining.

Prof. Pal is widely recognized across the world for his pioneering and extraordinary contributions in Machine Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition.

This has made India a leader in these disciplines in international scenario.

SK Pal studied at the University of Calcutta for his BSc in physics (1969), and BTech (1972) and MTech (1974) in radio physics and electronics.

His image processing research in 1970s is perhaps the first investigation (other pioneer being A. Rosenfeld, UMD, College Park, USA) that brings out the root relation between the abstract concept of fuzzy sets and image processing tasks & the associated uncertainty involved.

Pal joined the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, as a CSIR Senior Research Fellow in 1975, and eventually entered into full professor position in 1987.

He received a PhD in radio physics and electronics from the Rajabazar Science College campus of University of Calcutta in 1979 as a student of Indian Statistical Institute, and another PhD in electrical engineering along with Diploma of the Imperial College from Imperial College, University of London, in 1982.

Subsequently, definitions for image entropy (mid 1980s) and generalized rough-fuzzy entropy (mid 2000s) based on logarithmic and exponential gain functions are provided for modelling the uncertainty.

These measures are unique.

This fundamental work laid the foundation of fuzzy (soft) image processing and computer vision research.

After completing PhD at Imperial College, London as a Commonwealth Scholar, he did post-doctoral research there during 1982 to 1983 as a UK Medical Research Council Fellow.

Subsequently, he worked at the University of California, Berkeley and University of Maryland, College Park from 1986 to 1987 as a Fulbright Fellow; NASA Johnson Space Center from 1990 to 1992 and in 1994 as a US NAS-NRC Senior Research Associate; and US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, D.C. in 2004 as a visiting scientist.

He is a recipient of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1990.

The generic families of such hybrid intelligent models (networks) developed (in early 1990s) not only provide enhanced learning, understandability, knowledge mining and uncertainty management in decision-making, but also can explain the network decision in natural language.

Rough-fuzzy hybridization further enables mining linguistic, categorical and relational data.

The neural models, capable of accepting linguistic input, constitute the basic modules that laid the foundation of neuro-fuzzy computing and later, soft computing.

Augmentation of the original definition of soft computing by introducing rough sets as its fifth constituent is another contribution of his research.

This enhances greatly the computational intelligence of soft computing methodologies.

All these have led to significant synergistic technological developments in modern AI (including explainable AI) and data science.

He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit in 1993, and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility (the first of its kind in the country) in 2004, both at the ISI.

In the process he has created many renowned scientists out of his doctoral students.

Besides, he had been a Distinguished Visitor of IEEE Computer Society (USA) for Asia-Pacific Region since 1997, and held several visiting positions in Australia, Poland, Italy, France, New Zealand, Japan and Hong Kong universities.

He established sustained research collaborations with many foreign universities, particularly in Europe such as the Warsaw University, Poland (1997-2017), Naples University, Italy (2004-2020) and INSEAD, France (2001-2013) under joint agreements between Nations or Institutes, and Hong Kong Poly University, Hong Kong, China (1999-2008).

He then became a distinguished scientist in 1998, the director in 2005, and the president in 2022.

He was the first computer scientist as well as someone outside statistics and mathematics to become the director of ISI in its 75-year history.

His other highly cited original research include: i) Unsupervised dimensionality reduction algorithm (in early 2000s) producing maximally independent features, that results in fast and superior performance and is suitable for Big data, ii) Granular computing concept and models particularly when samples are indiscernible; here computations are performed using information granules rather than individual samples, thereby providing gain in both computation and performance in mining tasks, and iii) Z*-number, developed in mid 2010s, for machine subjectivity representation in machine-mind development by encapsulating the objective and subjective time, context, and affect components in natural language of thoughts, speech, and texts.

Prof. Pal is widely recognized across the world for his pioneering and exemplary contributions in Machine Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition.

This has made India a big leader in these disciplines in international scenario.

He is a co-author of twenty one books, eighteen conference proceedings, about five hundred and fifty research publications, and two US patents.

He has served/serving as editor in most of the well-known scientific journals in computer science and engineering (~25 international journals).

He visited more than forty countries as a Keynote/ Invited speaker or academic visitor.

He has co-authored with researchers from 48 foreign and 16 Indian institutes.

According to Google Scholar, Pal's work had been cited more than 37,000 times with h-index of 84.

He was awarded Padma Shri in Science and Engineering on 5 April 2013 by the President of India Pranab Mukherjee in recognition of his work in machine intelligence.