Umapada Pal received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Indian Statistical Institute. His PhD work was on the development of printed Bangla OCR system. He did his Post Doctoral research at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), France. From January 1997, he is a Faculty member of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and at present he is a Professor. His fields of research interest include Digital Document Processing, Optical Character Recognition, Camera/video text processing,  Biometrics, etc. He has published more than 260 research papers in various international journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes. Because of his significant impact in the Document Analysis research, in 2003 he received “ICDAR Outstanding Young Researcher Award” from International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). In 2005-2006 Dr. Pal has received JSPS fellowship from Japan government. In 2008, 2011 and 2012, Dr. Pal received visiting fellowship from Spain, France and Australia government, respectively. Dr. Pal has been serving as General/Program/Organizing Chair of many conferences including International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), International Conference on Frontiers of Handwritten Recognition (ICFHR), International Workshop on Document Analysis and Systems (DAS), Asian Conference on Pattern recognition (ACPR) etc. Also he has served as a program committee member of more than 50 international events. He has many international research collaborations and supervising Ph.D. students of 5 foreign universities. He is serving as associate Editor of the journal of ACM Transactions of Asian Language Information Processing (ACM-TALIP), Pattern recognition Letters (PRL), Electronic Letters on Computer Vision and Image Analysis (ELCVIA) etc. Also he has served as a guest editor of several special issues. He is a Fellow of IAPR (International Association of Pattern Recognition).