Born in India, Anil K. Jain received his Bachelor of Technology in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1969. He received his MS and PhD from the Ohio State University in 1970 and 1973, respectively.

His PhD advisor was Robert B. McGhee, and his PhD thesis was titled Some Aspects of Dimensionality and Sample Size Problems in Statistical Pattern Recognition.

Jain taught at Wayne State University from 1972 to 1974 and joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1974, where he is currently a University Distinguished Professor.

 

Jain is an ISI Highly Cited researcher. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and Indian National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to the engineering and practice of biometrics".

In 2007, he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award, the highest technical honor awarded by the IEEE Computer Society, for his pioneering contributions to theory, technique, and practice of pattern recognition, computer vision, and biometric recognition systems.

He has also received numerous other awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Humboldt Research Award, IAPR Pierre Devijver Award, Fulbright Fellowship, IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award, IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize, and IEEE ICDM Research Contribution Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE for contributions to image processing, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE.

He also received best paper awards from the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (1996) and the Pattern Recognition journal (1987, 1991, and 2005).

 

He served as a member of the U.S. National Academies panels on Information Technology, Whither Biometrics and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED).

He also served as a member of the Defense Science Board, Forensic Science Standards Board, and AAAS Latent Fingerprint Working Group. In 2019, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Based on his Google Scholar profile, he had an h-index of 200 in 2020, which was the highest among computer scientists identified in a survey published by UCLA at the time, however he was since surpassed by Yoshua Bengio, a researcher of similar subjects (neural networks and deep learning for artificial intelligence). As of August 2023, Jain's h-index on Google Scholar is 211 and Bengio's is 224.

 

Another source reported that as of December 2022, he had the highest discipline h-index (D-index) in computer science.

 

Anil Jain was conferred a doctorate honoris causa by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2021 and by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2018.