IAPR Major Prize Winners Announced

The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) Announces the Winners of Its Major Prizes

The King-Sun Fu, J. K. Aggarwal and Maria Petrou Prizes will be presented formally at the 27th International Conference on Pattern Recognition that will take place December 1-5, 2024, in Kolkata, India.

Honoring King-Sun Fu, J. K. Aggarwal and Maria Petrou, three pioneers in the field of Pattern Recognition, these awards are presented every two years.


The King-Sun Fu Prize is the highest honor bestowed by IAPR. The award was established to honor the memory of Professor Fu, instrumental in founding IAPR and its first President, who is widely recognized for his extensive and pioneering contributions to the fields of pattern recognition and machine intelligence.

The 2024 King-Sun Fu Prize recipient is Tin Kam Ho (IBM Watson, USA) “For pioneering contributions to multi-classifier systems, random decision forests, and data complexity analysis.”


The J. K. Aggarwal Prize is given to a young scientist who has brought substantial contributions to a field that is relevant to the IAPR Community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field. Professor Aggarwal is widely recognized for his extensive contributions to the field of pattern recognition and for his many contributions to IAPR’s activities.

The 2024 J. K. Aggarwal Prize recipient is Xiaolong Wang (UC San Diego, USA) “For his groundbreaking contributions to advancing visual representation learning, utilizing self-supervised and attention-based models to establish fundamental frameworks for creating versatile, general-purpose pattern recognition systems”


The Maria Petrou Prize honors the memory of Professor Maria Petrou as a scientist of the first rank and particularly her role as a pioneer for women researchers. The prize is given to a living woman scientist/engineer who has made substantial contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition and whose activities may be regarded as a model to both established and aspiring researchers.

The 2024 Maria Petrou Prize recipient is Guoying Zhao (University of Oulu, Finland) “For contributions to video analysis for facial micro-behavior recognition and remote bio-signal reading (RPPG) for heart rate analysis and face anti-spoofing”