Nalini Ratha named editor-in-chief of international IEEE journal on biometrics

by Jane Stoyle Welch

Ratha, an Empire Innovation Professor in the University at Buffalo’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will serve in this role for three years, through June of 2024.

An expert in the areas of biometrics, computer vision and bias, and trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ratha joined UB in the fall of 2020. Before that, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he was a distinguished researcher in biometrics and recipient of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Biometrics Council Leadership Award.

“I am particularly excited at being selected for the role of editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, as the mission of the journal aligns well with my own personal research interests,” says Ratha.

As editor-in-chief, Ratha aims to enhance the reputation and impact of the journal and continue its commitment to the timely review of submitted papers.

“Serving as the editor-in-chief of a major IEEE journal is a testament to the quality of our faculty and we are so proud of Nalini’s achievement. His service at this position will improve the visibility of UB at the international level and help us realize our goal of becoming a top 25 public university,” said Jinhui Xu, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.  

During his 25-year career at IBM, Ratha was recognized with a Research Division award and an Outstanding Technical Innovation Award, and he was named an IBM Research Master Inventor in 2018. He holds over 85 patents as either an inventor or co-inventor of a wide range of biometric inventions.

Ratha has co-chaired several workshops on the topics of blockchain, biometrics, fairness, and trust in AI and co-edited several special issues of IEEE publications. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and a distinguished scientist of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

He has co-authored a popular textbook entitled “A Guide to Biometrics Selection and System Design” and co-edited four books entitled “Deep Learning-Based Face Analytics,” “Domain Adaptation in Visual Understanding,” “Advances in Biometrics: Sensors, Algorithms and Systems” and “Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Systems.”

Ratha served as the president of the IEEE Biometrics Council from January 2011 to December 2012 and currently serves as the Fellow Committee chair and member of the nominations committee for the IEEE Biometrics Council. He has served on advisory boards of EU-INGRESS and EU-Fidelity and has served on several National Science Foundation evaluation panels.

He received a PhD in computer science from Michigan State University.