Arni S.R. Srinivasa Rao works in pure mathematics, applied mathematics, probability, and artificial intelligence and applications in medicine. He is a Professor at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, U.S.A, and the Director of the Laboratory for Theory and Mathematical Modeling housed within the Division of Infectious Diseases, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, U.S.A. Previously, Dr. Rao conducted research and/or taught at Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford (2003, 2005-07), Indian Statistical Institute (1998-2002, 2006-2012), Indian Institute of Science (2002-04), University of Guelph (2004-06). Until 2012, Dr. Rao held a permanent faculty position at the Indian Statistical Institute. He has won the Heiwa-Nakajima Award (Japan) and Fast Track Young Scientists Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences (DST, New Delhi). Dr. Rao also proved a major theorem in stationary population models, such as, Rao's Partition Theorem in Populations, Rao-Carey Theorem in stationary populations, and developed mathematical modeling-based policies for the spread of diseases like HIV, H5N1, COVID-19, etc. He developed a new set of network models for understanding avian pathogen biology on grid graphs (these were called chicken walk models), AI Models for COVID-19 and received wide coverage in the science media. Recently, he developed concepts such as “Exact Deep Learning Machines, and “Multilevel Contours within a bundle of Complex Number Planes.
Dr. Venu Govindaraju, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is the Vice President of Research and Economic Development of the University at Buffalo and founding director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors. He received his Bachelor’s degree with honors from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1986, and his Ph.D. from UB in 1992. His research focus is on machine learning and pattern recognition in the domains of Document Image Analysis and Biometrics. Dr. Govindaraju has co-authored about 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 was also the prime technical lead responsible for technology transfer to the Postal Services in US, Australia, and UK. He has been a Principal or Co-Investigator of sponsored projects funded for about 65 million dollars. Dr. Govindaraju has supervised the dissertations of 30 doctoral students. He has served on the editorial boards of premier journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Biometrics Council Compendium. Dr. 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.