News

First Open Calls for Nominations for the 2026 King-Sun Fu, J.K. Aggarwal, and Maria Petrou Prizes to be presented at ICPR 2026 in Lyon, France.

Please send an email now to Executive IAPR Secretariat Linda O’Gorman (exec-secretariat@iapr.org) with the name(s) of potential nominees. NOTE that this is for informational purposes only and does not constitute the formal nomination nor endorsement of a candidate.

The King Sun Fu Prize, the highest honor bestowed by IAPR, is given to a living person in recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of pattern recognition.

The J. K. Aggarwal Prize is given to an early career scientist (within ten years of completing their Ph.D. degree at the time of nomination) who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field.

The Maria Petrou Prize is awarded to a living woman scientist/engineer who has made substantial contributions to the field of pattern recognition (or a closely related field) and whose past contributions, current research activity, and future potential may be regarded as a model to both aspiring and established researchers.

If you have qustions, please contact Linda O’Gorman exec-secretariat@iapr.org or Arun Ross treasurer@iapr.org, ExCo Liaison to the Prize Committees.

Thank you,

Arun Ross, IAPR Treasurer and ExCo Liaison to the Prize Committees

Dear Governing Board and National Societies,

At ICPR 2026, the IAPR will induct approximately 20 new IAPR Fellows. See:

https://iapr.org/fellows/fellow-nominations/

The Fellow award celebrates a combination of academic achievement and service to the community (and particularly to the IAPR and its national member societies). The Fellow Committee has worked hard to help rebalance the achievement and service criteria.

The nominations are made by members of the National Societies.

“Anyone who has been a member of an IAPR member society for at least 5 years and has sufficient scientific contribution as well as significant Contribution/Service/Involvement towards IAPR is eligible to be nominated.”

The deadline for nominations is 28 February 2026.

If you have questions, please contact: fc-chair@iapr.org, secretariat@iapr.org

Best wishes,

Umapada Pal, Chair
IAPR Fellow Committee

The email changes mentioned below came into effect on Monday, October 21, 2024. Please make a note and update your Contacts accordingly.

IAPR is thrilled to welcome Rosemary Green as the Assistant IAPR Secretariat, managing day-to-day administration of the Office of the Secretariat. Email:  secretariat@iapr.org

Linda O’Gorman will continue to run the Office of the Secretariat, providing higher-level support to the Governing Board, ExCo, and other committees. Email:  exec-secretariat@iapr.org

Read more about Rosemary and her background in the October issue of the IAPR Newsletter, which will be published at the end of the month.

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 27^th 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.

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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 Research, USA) “For pioneering contributions to multi-classifier systems, random decision forests, and data complexity analysis.”

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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”

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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”

The deadline for nominations for the J. K. Aggarwal and Maria Petrou Prizes to be presented at ICPR 2024 in Kolkata, India, December 1-5, 2024, has been extended to April 21, 2024.

More information can be found here:

J. K. Aggarwal Prize

Maria Petrou Prize

The Pierre Devijver Award commemorates Pierre Devijver, one of the founders of statistical pattern recognition. The award is presented at a special lecture at S+SSPR to an outstanding scientist who has contributed significantly to the field of statistical pattern recognition.

We call for nominations of candidates for the 2024 award. The lecture will be presented at S+SSPR 2024, the IAPR Joint International Workshops on Statistical Techniques in Pattern Recognition (SPR 2024) and Structural and Syntactic Pattern Recognition (SSPR 2024):

https://sites.google.com/view/s-sspr-2024/

For more information, please see the Pierre Devijver Award page.

Please use the links below to view the Call for Nomination pages for these prizes and awards to be presented at ICPR 2024.

The King-Sun Fu, J. K. Aggarwal, and Maria Petrou Prize Committees have announced the following deadline schedule:

• Preliminary nomination deadline:  January 31, 2024; nomination forms must be submitted by this date; these and previously submitted nominations may be modified until the Endorsement/final deadline, but no new nominations will be accepted after the nomination deadline.
• Endorsement/final deadline:  March 31, 2024; all endorsements must be submitted and all forms related to the nomination must be complete and final by this date.

The IAPR Fellow Award:

• Nomination and Endorsement deadline:  March 31, 2024; all nominations and endorsements must be received by this date.

The International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) is the major scientific event organized under the auspices of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). The aim of this conference is to bring together international experts to share their work and experiences and to promote research and development in Pattern Recognition.

The conference is hosted by an institution under the auspices of an endorsing IAPR member organization (national pattern recognition society). Any such institutions interested in making a proposal to host an ICPR must proceed according to the rules outlined in the latest version of the guidelines.

It has been the tradition that the location of ICPR conferences follows a rotating schedule among different continents. Hence, proposals from Europe are strongly encouraged. However, high quality bids from other locations will also be reviewed for consideration.

Please see the official call for bids on the ICPR Proposals page for additional details.

The IAPR Fellow Committee (Chair, Umapada Pal) announces an Open Call for Nominations for the 2024 IAPR Fellow Awards (Deadline:  March 31, 2024).

Please see the IAPR Fellow Call for Nominations page for more details and links to the Nomination and Endorsement Forms.

Biennially, at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition, the IAPR awards three prestigious prizes and names its Fellows.

ICPR 2022 will take place August 21-25, 2022 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. 

The IAPR encourages geographic, ethnic, and gender diversity in nominations for its prizes and awards.

Calls for Nominations have been posted at the IAPR website for:

• The King-Sun Fu Prize, given in recognition of an outstanding technical contribution to the field of Pattern Recognition. Deadlines:  April 2, 2022 (nomination); April 4, 2022 (endorsements)
• The J. K. Aggarwal Prize, given to a young scientist (under 40 at the nominations deadline) who has brought substantial contribution to a field relevant to the IAPR community and whose research work has had a major impact on the field. Deadline:  May 1, 2022 (all forms)
• The Maria Petrou Prize, given to a female scientist/engineer who has made substantial contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition (or a closely related field) and who may be regarded as a model to aspiring and established researchers. Deadline:  May 1, 2022 (all forms)
• The IAPR Fellow Award, conferreed on persons to acknowledge their distinguished contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition and to IAPR activities. Deadline:  January 31, 2022 (all forms)