Europe-Wide Research Activities: Some Examples
Conducted PhD and Post-doctoral research in Electrical Engineering Department, Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, UK during September 1979 - May 1983.with Commonwealth Scholarship, UK, and Medical Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship UK. He pioneered the development of “fuzzy set theoretic image processing” research with his PhD Advisor/ Mentor Dr. Robert A. King. Since a gray tone image possesses some ambiguity within the pixels due to the possible multivalued levels of brightness, its regions, boundaries, edges, skeletons, relations etc. are ill-defined and do not lend themselves to precise definition. His research introduces some basic models and tasks, like gray image definition, image enhancement, edge detection, primitive extraction, image ambiguity measures (entropy and index of fuzziness), and image thresholding/segmentation in the notion of fuzzy set theory. Here one avoids committing oneself to a specific segmentation (i.e., either 0 or 1 of pixel-membership) and allows the segments to be fuzzy subsets (i.e., continuum pixel membership in [0.1]) of the image. See for example, Electron. Letters, 1980; IEEE-SMC, 1981, 1983; IEEE-PAMI, 1982, 1983; and Pattern Recognition Letters, 1983. Images were collected from Philips Research Lab, Redhill, Surrey (in the form of paper tape), and Institute of Sick Children, London (X-ray plates of hand and wrist). These basic models and definitions developed have laid the foundation (building blocks) of fuzzy/soft computing-based image processing and vision research. His work is perhaps the first investigation that brings out the root relation between the abstract concept of fuzzy sets and image processing tasks.
Established sustained and extensive research
collaborations with many other European institutions and centers where he
held numerous visiting positions. Many articles, books, journal special
issues, theses, and conference proceedings were published out of these
collaborations. For example, in Warsaw University, Poland, his collaboration
(1997-2017) began under INDO-POLISH joint Government program, with Prof.
Andrzej Skowron, Institute of Mathematics, Warsaw University and Prof.
Zdzisław Pawlak (Father of Rough Sets), Warsaw Technical University.
Notably, the “Rough-Fuzzy “computing paradigm was conceptualized during his
first visit there in 1997 (Pal and Skowron book, Springer, 1999). This
collaboration, particularly with Professor Pawlak (the creator of rough
sets) and Prof. Skowron’s research group, has been instrumental in earning
several of his team's achievements and laurels at Indian Statistical
Institute (ISI), Kolkata in the said area including the establishment of the
world class Center for Soft Computing Research, funded by the Department of
Science & Technology, Govt. of India. The research initiated by the said
cooperation, including their joint projects, and continued by himself and
his team for years at ISI, Kolkata have laid the foundation for, and led to,
numerous modern technologies and important real-world applications of these
hybrid methodologies in AI and data science.
In Naples University Parthenope, Italy, his collaboration (2004-2020)
started with Prof. Alfredo Petrosino, Applied Mathematics Department, under
a joint agreement between two Institutes to utilize his expertise in soft
computing and data mining in strengthening a research group there. Concept
of “Kernel Set“ of rough outlier sets for spatio-temporal outlier detection
is an example outcome (IEEE-TKDE, 2014), among others, which has wider
applications in data science and analytics. Collaboration in INSEAD, France
(2001-13) was in the area of web intelligence with Prof. Soumitra Dutta,
(the then) Dean, School of IT Management. INSEAD provided a grant to
ISI-Kolkata to support his PhD students. Interesting concepts concerning,
e.g., web surfer model (IEEE-TKDE, 2005) and dispersion index for pattern
classification (Pattern Recognition, 2012) resulted.
Total Articles Published under collaboration (with UK, Italy, Poland and France): 28 (Journal: 19, Conference: 5, Book Chapter: 4)
Books Published: 3 (i) S.K. Pal, A. Petrosino and L. Maddalena (Eds.), Handbook in Soft Computing for Visual Surveillance, Chapman & Hall/ CRC Press, Boca Raton, Florida, 2012; ii) S.K. Pal, L. Polkowski and A. Skowron (Eds.), Rough-Neural Computing: Techniques for Computing with Words, Springer, Heidelberg, 2003; iii) S.K. Pal and A. Skowron (Eds.), Rough Fuzzy Hybridization: A New Trend in Decision Making, Springer, 1999)
Journal Special Issues Guest-Edited: 8 (i) P. Maji, S.K. Pal, and A. Skowron, “Pattern Recognition and Mining”, Natural Computing, vol. 15, no. 3, 2016; ii) S.K. Pal, S. Meher and A. Skowron, “Granular Mining and Knowledge Discovery”, Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 67, part 2, pp. 109-112, 2015; iii) C. Cornelis, H.S. Nguyen, S.K. Pal, A. Skowron and W.Z. Wu, “Rough Sets and Fuzzy Sets”, Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 142, nos. 1-4, December 2015; iv) A. Petrosino and S.K. Pal, “Decision Making in Human and Machine Vision", IEEE T-SMC: Systems, vol, 44, no. 5, 2014; v) H.S. Nguyen, S.K. Pal and A. Skowron, “Rough sets and Fuzzy sets in Natural Computing”, Theoretical Computer Science - C, vol. 412, no. 42, 2011.; vi) S.K. Pal and A. Skowron, “Rough Sets, Pattern Recognition and Data Mining”, Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 24, 2003; vii) S.K. Pal, W. Pedrycz, A. Skowron and R. Swiniarski, “Rough-neuro Computing”, Neurocomputing, vol. 36, nos. 1-4, 2001; viii) S.K. Pal and A. Skowron, “Soft Computing”, Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 37, nos. 1-2, 1999.)
Conferences Jointly Organized & Proceedings: 4 (i) M. Kryszkiewicz, S. Bandyopadhyay, H. Rybinski and S.K. Pal (Eds.), Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (6th Int. Conf, PReMI 2015, Proceedings, Warsaw, Poland), LNCS, vol. 9124, Springer, Heidelberg, 2015; ii) S.O. Kuznetsov, D.P. Mandal, M.K. Kundu and S.K. Pal (Eds.), Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (4th Int. Conf. on PReMI 2011, Proceedings, Moscow, Russia), LNCS, vol. 6744, Springer, Berlin, 2011; iii) V. Gesu, S.K. Pal and A. Petrosino (Eds), Fuzzy Logic and Applications (8th Int. Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Appls., Proceedings, Palermo, Sicily, Italy), LNAI, vol. 5571, Springer, Berlin, 2009; iv) D. Slezak, S.K. Pal et al, (Eds.), Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition (2009 Int. Conf. on Signal Processing, Image Processing and Pattern Recognition, SIP 2009 Proceedings), Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 61, Springer, Berlin, 2010.)
Visiting Fellowship: With his active initiative many
of his PhDs and post-docs were/ are in Europe for joint training and
academic visits with Commonwealth Scholarship, Humboldt and DAAD Fellowship,
or some other programs.
Some Example Named/ Keynote Lectures in Europe since 2003:
Keynote talk at the 5th Int. Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF 2003), Istituto Italiano Studi Filosofici, Palazzo Serra di Cassano, Naples, Italy, October 9-11, 2003.
Plenary talk at the MSRAS-2004, Plock, Poland and two invited Talks at Warsaw University, Poland, June 7-9, 2004.
Series of invited talks on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence at the University of Trento, Trento, Italy, October 24-30, 2004.
Keynote talk at the 6th Int. Workshop on Data Analysis in Astronomy, Erice, Italy, April 15-18, 2007.
A series of invited talks at the University of Naples, Italy, April 19-22, 2007.
Attended the TWAS Meeting, Trieste, Italy, and delivered a Guest Lecture at the University of Naples, Italy, November 12-18, 2007.
Zdzislaw Memorial Plenary Talk at the Int. Conference on Rough Sets and Emerging Intelligent Systems Paradigms (RSEISP), Warsaw, Poland, June 29, 2007.
Invited talk at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, June 27-30, 2008.
A series of invited talks (under a ISI - EU project) at the University of Trento, Italy, February 4-10, 2009
Keynote talk at the Int. Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications (WILF'09), University of Palermo, Italy, June 9-12, 2009.
A series of lectures at the University of Naples, Italy, under ISI-Naples Univ. collaborative program, during June 13-20, 2009
Invited talk at the University of Milano, Italy, June 21-22, 2009.
Invited talk at the Int. Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (ICSD 2009), University of Trento, Italy, September 8-12, 2009.
Zdzislaw Pawlak Memorial Plenary Talk at the 7th Int. Conference on Rough Sets and Current Trends in Computing (RSCTC), Warsaw, Poland, June 28, 2010.
Keynote talk at 4th Int. KES Symposium on Agents and Multi-Agent systems - Technologies & Applications, Gdynia, Poland, June 23-26, 2010.
Keynote talk at 7th Int. Conference on Rough Sets & Current Trends in Computing, RSCTC 2010, Warsaw, Poland, June 28-30, 2010.
Keynote talk at 7th Int. Workshop on Data Analysis in Astronomy (DAA2011), Erice, Italy, 11-15, 2011.
Talk at 4th Int. Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI-11), Moscow, Russia, as its General Chair, June 25-30. 2011.
Invited talk at the University of Padova, Italy, September 23-24, 2011.
Invited talks at 2012 Int. Falls School in Natural Computing (FSNC 2012), Tarragona, Spain, November 19-23, 2012.
Keynote talk at the 23rd Italian Workshop on Neural Networks, Vietri, Salerno, Italy, May 22-25, 2013.
Invited talk at the Int. Conf. on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP), Naples, Italy, Sept 10-13, 2013.
Plenary Talk at the 6th Int. Conference on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (PReMI'15), Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, June 2015.
Invited talk at the Szechenyi Istvan University, Gyor, Hungary, November 13-16, 2015.
Invited Talks at the Universitat Paderborn, Germany, November 22-25, 2015.
Invited Talk at German Workshop on Computational Intelligence, Dortmund, Germany, Nov 26-27, 2015.
Series of Invited Talks at the 2nd Int. Winter School on Big Data (BigDat 2016) at University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain, February 7–11, 2016.
Talks at Data Mining Services, Ltd., Windsor, U.K., under a collaborative meeting, June 13 - 15, 2016.
Invited talk at Santander Bank, London, U.K., June 17, 2016.
Keynote talk at the Int. Joint Conference on Rough Sets, IJCRS 2017, University of Warmia and Mazury, Olsztyn, Poland, July 3-7, 2017.
Invited talks at the Dept. of Science and Technology, University of Naples, Parthenope, Naples, Italy, Nov 19-22, 2017.
Invited talk at the University of Genoa, Italy, November 23-24, 2017.
Series of invited talk(s) at 5th Int. School on Big Data (BigDat 2019), University of Cambridge, U.K., January 7-11, 2019.
Collaborative research work jointly with Arndit Ltd., St. John’s Innovation Center, Cowley Road, Cambridge CB4 OWS, U.K., and the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, U.K. during July 30 to August 27, 2023.
Keynote talk at Data Fusion Conference 2024 (Nation-wide top-level event on AI & Data Science), Moscow, Russia, April 17 and 18, 2024.
Other Activities:
Editorial Board Member of several journals like Pattern Recognition Letters, Information Sciences, Fuzzy Sets and Systems, Neurocomputing, Int. J. Approximate Reasoning, and Fundamenta Informaticae which are published by Netherlands based publishing companies such as Elsevier and IOS Press.
Book Series Editor: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, Netherlands based publishing house.
Editor of eleven LNCS/ LNAI publications from Springer Heidelberg, Germany.
Author of six books by Springer, Berlin or Heidelberg, Germany.
PhD Thesis Foreign Examiner, University of Naples, Parthenope, Italy, 2010 (PhD student: Ms. Alessia Albanese).
Member, Expert Committee to evaluate the “Centre
for New Methods in Computational Diagnostics and Personalized Therapy
(SANO)” as a part of The International Research Agenda Program PLUS,
Poland, 2022.
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