King-Sun Fu

Timeline

1. 1930–1959

   Degrees in Taiwan, Toronto and Illinois

   Born in Nanjing in October 1930, he earns a BS from National Taiwan University in 1953 and a master's degree from the University of Toronto in 1955. He completes a PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1959 under Mac Van Valkenburg, with a dissertation on least-squares approximation of magnitude and phase by rational functions.

2. 1959–1975

   From Boeing to Purdue

   After his 1959 PhD, he joins the Boeing Airplane Company as a research engineer working on the design of an adaptive autopilot system for supersonic transport. He comes to Purdue as an assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1960, becomes a full professor in 1966, and is named W. M. Goss Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering in 1975. He also takes part in founding Purdue's Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing, and methods from him and his students become routine tools for analyzing remotely sensed images.

3. 1971–1978

   Guggenheim Fellow and NAE member

   In 1971, he becomes an IEEE Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. He receives the Herbert N. McCoy Award for contributions to science in 1976 and is elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1976. He becomes a member of Academia Sinica in 1978.

4. 1972–1980

   First president of the IAPR

   In 1972, he brings together a committee to organize an international conference on pattern recognition, and he chairs the First International Joint Conference on Pattern Recognition in 1973. He works on the IAPR Constitution until its ratification in November 1976, then serves as the association's first president from 1976 to 1978 and as past president until 1980.

5. 1974–1978

   Founding editor of IEEE TPAMI

   He reorganizes the Pattern Recognition Committee and becomes its first chairman in 1974, which leads to the founding of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He serves as the journal's first editor-in-chief in 1978, and the IEEE Computer Society gives him a Special Award for its initiation and his first senior editorship.

6. 1974–1982

   A grammar for patterns

   Often called the father of automatic pattern recognition, he points out the similarity between recognizing patterns in pictures and recognizing patterns in an English sentence, and formulates a grammar for patterns that leads to syntactic and semantic pattern recognition. He publishes Syntactic Methods in Pattern Recognition in 1974 and Syntactic Pattern Recognition and Applications in 1982.

7. 1981–1982

   The IEEE Education Medal

   The American Society for Engineering Education gives him its Senior Research Award in 1981. In 1982, he receives the IEEE Education Medal and the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award, the latter for his contributions in pattern recognition and its applications and his leadership in education in information processing.

8. 1985–1988

   The King-Sun Fu Prize

   He dies in Washington, D.C., in April 1985. In his memory, the IAPR creates the King-Sun Fu Prize, a biennial award to a living person for an outstanding technical contribution to pattern recognition, and presents the first one to Azriel Rosenfeld in 1988.