The 26th International Conference on Patter Recognition (ICPR) opened up on Aug. 22 at Montreal, Canada. The IAPR’s most prestigious King-Sun Fu Prize was honored to Prof. Tieniu Tan “for pioneering and landmark contributions to biometrics with practical applications”. This is the first time that this prize was awarded to researchers outside the Northern American and European Areas.

The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) set up the King-Sun Fu Prize in honor of the memory of Professor King-Sun Fu, who was instrumental in the founding of IAPR, served as its first president, and is widely recognized for his extensive contributions to the field of pattern recognition. This biennial prize is given to a living person in recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition. It is recognized as the IAPR’s highest award and a most important award in the Artificial Intelligence research field. A total of 17 researchers has been honored with this award, and they are all from Northern American and European developed countries. Prof. Tieniu Tan is the first awardee outside these regions.

Pattern Recognition is about the research on human perception, recognition, and judgement, and it is a fundamental part of Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Tan’s research lies in the field of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence since a long time ago, especially pioneering in iris recognition and gait recognition subfields. His research work has been applied to practical applications relating national economy and people's livelihood. Prof. Tan is a Fellow of CAS (Chinese Academy of Sciences), TWAS (The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries), IEEE and IAPR, Corresponding Member of Brazil Academy of Sciences, and an International Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering.