Minorities and women, though, have continued to use extraordinary brainpower and research techniques to develop the technological movement that runs today’s world economy.

Scientists like Abhijit Mahalanobis develop major components of the missile defense system for the U.S. Army, while Wendy Williams ensures the continuing health of thousands of children. Robert Shepard alternates between helping the nuclear industry harness atoms and helping developing nations find new food sources in underutilized plants, while Joanne Killinger wages war on diseases affecting the young and old.

Wayne Greaves and Jonathan Abraham are at the forefront of those seeking innovative cures to lethal viral killers, while Michael Smith’s research paves the way for modern laser surgery, and Malika Jeffries-El finds synthetic alternatives to damaged nerves.

And yet, the existence of these and other minority scientists and the contributions they have made remain unsung. That must change.

That is why, five years ago, Science Spectrum magazine enlisted the participation of the country’s major technological companies to help develop the first peer-reviewed awards honoring the finest minority research scientists in the nation. Those companies meticulously assessed some of America’s finest under-represented science workers, and below are the winners. They are the people behind the science of life---the 2006 Emerald Honorees.

Scientist of the Year
Abhijit Mahalanobis, Ph.D.
Lockheed Martin Fellow
Lockheed Martin

As far as the U.S. Army was concerned, increasing technology for missile systems was a recipe for friendly fire disaster.

Night vision for tank units gave American mobile cavalry a huge advantage over competing Soviet-built systems, but tanks still need a person to think, point, and shoot. Computerized missile batteries could pick out targets 40 miles away¯far past the line of sight and through the smoke and din of a battlefield. The problem, however, was computerized missile batteries could just as easily blow up the wrong targets, thus elevating friendly fire to new, lethal levels.

To avoid this potential problem, the Department of Defense sought help from Abhijit Mahalanobis, a Lockheed Martin fellow in the company’s Missiles and Fire Control division, who has made a career of teaching computers to think.

“Ever since mankind started making machines,” says Mahalanobis, “the goal for a long, long time has been to automate the process of understanding what is in an image. The objective is to look at data¯whether it is imagery or other types of sources¯and find patterns that can be acted upon.”

 “In the medical world,” Mahalanobis continues, “that would mean algorithms to help doctors find tumors in X-rays, or in the biometric world it would be recognizing particular faces in a crowd or a fingerprint in a set of fingerprints.”

On the battlefield, it was necessary for a computer to distinguish between thermal signatures and radar signatures of everything from tanks to trees. This could be accomplished by programming algorithms and digitized pictures of all the world’s land-based weapons systems, as well as the refractive qualities of different types of surface minerals, rocks, and trees. The algorithms even adjust for distortions caused by a buildup of radiation from depleted uranium weapons.

“With a human in the midst of a combat situation,” says Mahalanobis, “we have tanks and they have tanks and the difference may not be so obvious. But from a machine’s point of view, the shapes are different, and they are very good at telling the difference between our M-1 tanks and the Soviet’s T-72 tanks.

“The most difficult problem is trying to recognize things when they are partially hidden. The weather doesn’t cooperate, there is dust and smoke in the battlefield, and people are clever and use counter measures.”

Even the presence of wildlife can complicate defense tactics. What do you do when enemy troops may be mingled with cattle or sheep on a smoky battlefield? What if the infrared signature detected something hiding in the woods at night, and that something was a bear and not an enemy soldier?

“We can detect the differences between moving objects of course,” says Mahalanobis, “and tell humans apart from animals. But nothing we have in the computer world comes quite close to the performance of a human brain.”

So Mahalanobis looked at the way things move and developed algorithms to analyze major joints of people and animals. When he was finished, cattle moving across a pasture to graze 40 miles away could enjoy a peaceful meal. Cattle accompanied by enemy troops could not. Mahalanobis’s Automatic Target Recognition system has become the plinth of the land-based missile and fire control defense of the U.S. Army and has set a standard for all future military computer recognition systems.

He then wrote the book Correlation Pattern Recognition, which serves as the primary text for the defense industry, earned three patents in the field, and was elevated to the rank of fellow at Lockheed Martin, the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, and the Optical Society of America.

In a sense, Dr. Mahalanobis’s career began at home in Assam, Indian, in the foothills of the Himalayas near the Chinese border. His early schooling was in an ashram with mud walls, open windows, a tin roof, and a dirt floor¯a school that put as much emphasis on integrity and community service as it did on rigorous academics. His father held a doctorate in radio physics, taught engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, and did a lot of early work in signal processing.

 “I used to hang around him,” recalls Mahalanobis, “and watch his work, and it became something that really appealed to me.”

 In 1981, his family relocated to California, where his father accepted a position with the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a year later Abhijit enrolled in the electrical engineering program there while adjusting to the vastly different norms of America.

 “I went through culture shock,” Mahalanobis says. “The university was a party school, whereas I came from a place that was extremely conservative.”

Mahalanobis got over his culture shock and shyness while completing his engineering degree in three years. He went on to Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering. It was in graduate school that he began focusing on his life’s work¯pattern recognition.

“My professor had a number of projects,” he says, “and one of them was to develop a system so the computer could tell you if you were facing a tank or a jeep. The challenge intrigued me, and that was the start.”

Mahalanobis then taught briefly at the University of Arizona, where he met and married his wife, Priti. In 1992, he became an American citizen, saying, “It was a very moving experience to be in a courtroom with other new Americans and be welcomed into the nation. I felt I had the best of both worlds¯the traditions of the old combined with the hope and opportunities offered by my new home.”

 With citizenship came the opportunity to delve more seriously into the most intractable aspects of pattern recognition.

Lockheed Martin lured Mahalanobis to its missile program in Orlando in 1991, and in just three years he rose to the rank of corporate fellow for his ground-breaking work in pattern recognition. He has become the world-recognized leader in the field, serving as pattern recognition chair of the Science and Engineering Council of the Optical Society of America and associate editor of both Applied Optics and Pattern Recognition.

Mahalanobis works on pattern recognition software across Lockheed Martin’s spectrum of research, lending his experience and unique insights to work on a variety of applications. Though his specialty is military software and analyzing battlefield situations miles away, the ramifications of his research may one day lead to systems equipped with the ability to recognize an errant cell within the human body, enabling medical systems to target these potentially lethal invaders.

When asked why he has devoted his life to improving the ways computers process and recognize the world around them, he pauses and says “I enjoy the process of working on a challenging problem. It’s just a personal passion.”

Mahalanobis’ passion has become an integral part of the defense of his adopted nation, and its spin-offs may improve the lives of billions around the globe.

To read more about 2006 Emerald Honors Scientist of the Year see 2006 Emerald Honors Scientist of the Year in the USBE News archive.