Rangachar Kasturi

Timeline

1. 1968–1982

   From Bangalore to Texas Tech

   Born in Bangalore in 1949, he earns a BE in electrical engineering from Bangalore University in 1968 and works as an engineer in India from 1968 to 1978. In 1978, he moves to the US for graduate study at Texas Tech University, where he receives an MSEE in 1980 and a PhD in 1982.

2. 1982–2003

   Professor at Penn State

   He joins the Pennsylvania State University in 1982 and is a professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering there until 2003. A project to teach computers to read maps, funded by his first National Science Foundation grant, leads him into document analysis, and a NASA faculty program in the summer of 1990 begins nearly a decade of funded work on computer vision for aircraft collision avoidance. From 1995 to 1998, he edits IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and he is an author of the textbook Machine Vision (McGraw-Hill, 1995).

3. 1996

   IEEE and IAPR fellowships

   In 1996, he becomes a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), the latter for contributions to document analysis and for service to IAPR.

4. 2000–2004

   IAPR vice president and president

   From 2000 to 2002, he serves as vice president of IAPR, and from 2002 to 2004 as its president. Along the way, he is general co-chair of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2001 and program co-chair of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in 2002.

5. 2008

   IEEE Computer Society president

   In 2008, he is president of the IEEE Computer Society. His other roles there include vice president of its Publications, Conferences, and Member and Geographic Activities boards, treasurer, and chair of the Board of Governors, and he leads IEEE's efforts to expand into India.

6. 2015

   The Merwin Award

   The IEEE Computer Society names him the 2015 recipient of its Richard E. Merwin Award for Distinguished Service, its highest award for volunteer service. The award recognizes three decades of Society roles that include general co-chair of CVPR and of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition.

7. 2017

   Outstanding Achievements Award

   IAPR and the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) give him the 2017 IAPR/ICDAR Outstanding Achievements Award for research in document image analysis and graphics recognition and for leadership of ICDAR and the international pattern recognition community. At ICDAR2017 in Kyoto, he delivers the opening keynote.

8. As of October 2026

   Emeritus professor at South Florida

   In 2003, he moves to the University of South Florida as chair of computer science and engineering, a post he holds until 2007, and as Douglas W. Hood Professor. There he directs a project that evaluates research progress in detection and tracking of faces, people, text, and vehicles in video sequences. After a career teaching machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision at Penn State and USF, he is Douglas W. Hood Professor Emeritus.