A National University of Science and Technology (NUST) scholar, Dr. Faisal Shafait, produced history by being the first Muslim scientist to receive the Young Scientist Award of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for his excellent contribution to photo pattern processing and computational forensics.
This is the first time that a Pakistani researcher has bagged the coveted Pattern Recognition & Record Analysis award. The 15th International Record Analysis & Recognition Conference (ICDAR) was held in Melbourne, Australia.
After 1997, the prize has been awarded every two years with scholars from the United States, Germany, China, Japan, Korea, France, Norway, and India on previous occasions receiving the prize.
Dr. Faisal is a well-known figure in Pakistan and currently works at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) Department of Computing.
His algorithms are part of Google’s open-source text recognition platform, Tesseract, along with 5,000 quotations from his books, which academics and engineers around the globe are using to improve reading systems.
His deep learning Urdu reading systems are helping illiterate people to read using smartphones, which accounts for almost 40 percent of Pakistan’s total population.