Tieniu Tan received his B.Sc. degree in electronic engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, in 1984, and his MSc and PhD degrees in electronic engineering from Imperial College London, U.K., in 1986 and 1989, respectively.

In October 1989, he joined the Computational Vision Group at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Reading, U.K., where he worked as a Research Fellow, Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer. In January 1998, he returned to China to join the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was the Director General of the CAS Institute of Automation from 2000-2007, and has been Professor and Director of the NLPR since 1998. He also serves as Deputy Secretary-General (for cyber-infrastructure and international affairs) of the CAS. He has published more than 350 research papers in refereed journals and conferences in the areas of image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition, and has authored or edited 9 books. He holds more than 50 patents. His current research interests include biometrics, image and video understanding, and information forensics and security.

Dr Tan is a Fellow of the IEEE and the IAPR (the International Association of Pattern Recognition). He has served as chair or program committee member for many major national and international conferences. He is or has served as Associate Editor or member of editorial boards of many leading international journals including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Pattern Recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, Image and Vision Computing, etc. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Automation and Computing. He was the Founding Chair of the IAPR Technical Committee on Biometrics, founding chair of the IAPR/IEEE International Conference on Biometrics and the IEEE International Workshop on Visual Surveillance. He currently serves as Vice President of the IAPR, the Executive Vice President of the Chinese Society of Image and Graphics, Deputy President of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, and was Deputy President of the China Computer Federation and the Chinese Automation Association. He has given invited talks and keynotes at many universities and international conferences, and has received numerous national and international awards and recognitions.