Anil Jain, an Indian American University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, has joined a panel of experts for a strategic and technological upgrade of India’s digital identity platform, Aadhaar.
An Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, graduate, Jain, the Douglas E. Zongker Endowed Professor of Engineering, is an internationally recognized innovator in pattern recognition and biometrics.
The Unique Identification Authority of India will shape a new Aadhaar Vision 2032, a forward-looking roadmap aligned with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act and emerging global standards of privacy and cybersecurity.
The expert panel will leverage cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, or AI, blockchain, quantum computing, advanced encryption and next-generation data security mechanisms.
Through his work with the Indian government, he helped design a secure, accurate and real-time identification system, called Aadhaar, for all 1.45 billion residents based on their fingerprints, face and iris.
Currently, Aadhaar is used to process approximately 80 million biometric authentications every day for routine transactions involving banking, welfare benefits, pensions, etc., and has provided an identity to the marginalized in India.
Jain received his B.S. from the IIT, Kanpur (1969) and M.S. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) degrees from The Ohio State University, all in Electrical Engineering.
Jain received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards and was inducted into the United States National Academy of Engineering, Indian National Academy of Engineering, The World Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors.
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Jain has authored foundational books in both biometrics and pattern recognition and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1991-1994) and was awarded the Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships along with the IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize.
He was appointed to the Defense Science Board, Forensic Science Standards Board, and the AAAS study team on Latent Fingerprint Recognition.
For his plethora of discoveries and applications in biometrics, his service to the research community, and his extensive mentorship, Jain was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2017), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2020) and Hong Kong Baptist University (2021).