Although I didn’t directly work with Hari, I met him many times at academic conferences and I was fortunate to serve on a couple conferences’ committees together with him. I was amazed by the depth and wisdom he demonstrated in the conversations in addition to his passion to educate and help the next generation researchers. It’s also remarkable that he’s always on the leading edge of the field and is continuously the scope, from OCR to biometrics, and to new machine learning methods, even after he already gained world-wide reputation long time ago. His impact on both advancing the scientific methods and applications and fostering the research community is enormous, and he will be deeply missed.