Vijay V. Raghavan, Alfred and Helen Lamson Endowed Professor in Computer Science, The Center for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, USA.Prof Raghavan also serves as the Director of the NSF-sponsored Industry/ University Cooperative Research Center for Visual and Decision Informatics. In this role, he co-ordinates several multi-institutional, industry-driven research projects and manages a budget of over $500K/year. From 1997 to 2003, he led a $2.3M research and development project in close collaboration with the USGS National Wetlands Research Center and with the Department of Energy's Office of Science and Technical Information on creating a digital library with data mining capabilities incorporated.His research interests are in Big Data, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning and Internet computing. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed research papers --appearing in top-level journals and proceedings - that cumulatively accord him an h-index of 31, based on citations.He has served as major advisor for 24 doctoral students and has garnered $10 million in external funding. Besides substantial technical expertise, Dr. Raghavan has vast experience managing interdisciplinary and multi- institutional collaborative projects. He has also directed industry-sponsored research, for companies such as GE Healthcare and Araicom Life Sciences L.L.C., on projects pertaining to Neuro-imaging based dementia detection and literature-based biomedical hypotheses generation, respectively. Venkat N. Gudivada is a professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at East Carolina University. Prior to this, he was a professor and founding chair of the Weisberg Division of Computer Science at Marshall University. His industry tenure spans over six years as a vice president for Wall Street companies in the New York City area including Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America Merrill Lynch) and Financial Technologies International (now GoldenSource). Previous academic tenure includes work at the University of Michigan, University of Missouri, and Ohio University.He has published over 90 peer-reviewed technical articles and rendered professional service in various roles including conference program chair, keynote speaker, program committee member, and guest editor of IEEE journals. Gudivada's research sponsors include National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Navy, U.S. Army Research Office, MU Foundation, and WV Division of Science and Research. His current research interests encompass Big Data Management, High Performance Computing, Information Retrieval, Image and Natural Language Processing, and Personalized Learning. Gudivada received a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is the founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors. He received his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His research focus is on machine learning and pattern recognition in the domains of Document Image Analysis and Biometrics.Prof. Govindaraju has co-authored over 400 refereed scientific papers. His seminal work in handwriting recognition was at the core of the first handwritten address interpretation system used by the US Postal Service. He has been a Principal or Co-Investigator of sponsored projects funded for about $65 million dollars. Prof. Govindaraju has supervised the dissertations of 30 doctoral students. He has served on the editorial boards of premier journals.Prof. Govindaraju is a Fellow of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), the IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition), and the SPIE (International Society of Optics and Photonics). He is recipient of the 2004 MIT Global Indus Technovator award and the 2010 IEEE Technical Achievement award. C. R. Rao is a world famous statistician who earned a place in the history of statistics as one of those “who developed statistics from its adhoc origins into a firmly grounded mathematical science. He was employed at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1943 as a research scholar after obtaining an MA degree in mathematics with a first class and first rank from Andhra University in1941 and MA degree in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943 with a first class, first rank, gold medal and record marks which remain unbroken during the last 73 years.“At the age of 28 he was made a full professor at ISI in recognition of his creativity. While at ISI, Rao went to Cambridge University (CU) in 1946 on an invitation to work on an anthropometric project using the methodology developed at ISI. Rao worked in the museum of archeology and anthropology in Duckworth laboratory of CU during 1946-1948 as a paid visiting scholar. The results were reported in the book “Ancient Inhabitants of Jebel Moya published by the Cambridge Press under the joint authorship of Rao and two anthropologists. On the basis of work done at CU during the two year period, 1946-1948, Rao earned a Ph.D. degree and a few years later Sc.D. degree of CU and the rare honor of life fellowship of Kings College, Cambridge.He retired from ISI in 1980 at the mandatory age of 60 after working for 40 years during which period he developed ISI as an international center for statistical education and research. He also took an active part in establishing state statistical bureaus to collect local statistics and transmitting them to Central Statistical Organization in New Delhi. Rao played a pivitol role in launching undergraduate and postgraduate courses at ISI. He is the author of 475 research publications and several breakthrough papers contributing to statistical theory and methodology for applications to problems in all areas of human endeavor. There are a number of classical statistical terms named after him, the most popular of which are Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-Blackwellization, Rao’s Orthogonal arrays used in quality control, Rao’s score test, Rao’s Quadratic Entropy used in ecological work, Rao’s metric and distance which are incorporated in most statistical books.He is the author of 10 books, of which two important books are, Linear Statistical Inference which is translated into German, Russian, Czec, Polish and Japanese languages,and Statistics and Truth which is translated into, French, German, Japanese, Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese, Turkish and Korean languages.He directed the research work of 50 students for the Ph.D. degrees who in turn produced 500 Ph.D.’s. Rao received 38 hon. Doctorate degree from universities in 19 countries spanning 6 continents. He received the highest awards in statistics in USA,UK and India: National Medal of Science awarded by the president of USA, Indian National Medal of Science awarded by the Prime Minister of India and the Guy Medal in Gold awarded by the Royal Statistical Society, UK. Rao was a recipient of the first batch of Bhatnagar awards in 1959 for mathematical sciences and and numerous medals in India and abroad from Science Academies. He is a Fellow of Royal Society (FRS),UK, and member of National Academy of Sciences, USA, Lithuania and Europe. In his honor a research Institute named as CRRAO ADVANCED INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICS, STATISTICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE was established in the campus of Hyderabad University.
