Academic Staff

Prof. Kumar is currently a Professor in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Chair of the Departmental Learning and Teaching Committee (2019-2021). He received B.Eng. degree in 1990, M.Eng. in 1992, and a Ph.D. degree from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, in 2001. He has earlier been working as an Assistant Professor, in Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India from 2005-2007.

His current research interests include biometrics with an emphasis on contactless hand biometrics, vascular biometrics, iris recognition, and multimodal biometrics. He holds seven U.S. patents and has authored a book on Contactless 3D Fingerprint Identification. He has served on the IEEE Biometrics Council as the Vice President for publications from 2011 to 2015. He was on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2010-2013), IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior and Identity Sciences (2018-2020). He has served on the program committees and organizing committee of several international conferences in the field of his research interest and recently as an area chair for CVPR 2019, CVPR 2020. Prof. Kumar was also the Program Chair for CVPR 2013-2020 Biometrics Workshops, ICEB 2010 (Hong Kong) and Program Co-Chair for IJCB 2011 (Washington DC), ICB 2013 (Madrid). He has also served as the General Chair of WIFS 2018 (Hong Kong) and as the General Co-Chair of IJCB 2014 (Tampa) and ISBA 2015 (Hong Kong).

Prof. Kumar is a Fellow of IAPR (since 2016), Fellow of IEEE (since 2018), recipient of ‘Faculty Award in 2018 for Outstanding Achievement in Research and Scholarly Activities’ and President’s Award in 2012 for ‘Excellent Performance in Research and Scholarly Activities (Team) in PolyU. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2019 onwards). He was elected as the President of IEEE Biometrics Council in 2019 and currently serving as its President (2021-2022).

• Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition
• Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers