John Oommen has visited more than 30 countries, working and publishing with researchers from China to Chile. A native of India, the Computer Science professor also speaks Norwegian and supervises students in Norway.

Three decades of teaching and researching have garnered Oommen a global reputation and international accolades. Honoured as one of Carleton's Chancellor's Professors in 2006, Oommen became the first person ever to attain the rank of Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in Ontario. In 2003, he was one of the few to be nominated as a Fellow to the Institute of Electrical Engineers for his work in artificial intelligence.

As of last year, he has turned his sights to drink a Chilean wine, to be precise.

In the summer of 2009, the Embassy of Chile caught wind of Oommen's work through one of his graduate students, Cesar Astudillo. Astudillo, a native of Chile, and Oommen had co-authored a paper, which won the Best Paper Award at an artificial intelligence conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2009.

Last November, Oommen met with a delegation representing the Chilean wine industry and seeking Canadian collaborators to work on some of the problems they are facing. Soon after, the Chilean ambassador invited Oommen to dinner; he hoped that the Carleton professor could help "automate" the Chilean wine industry and deal with the effects of global warming.

"I was able to give them potential solutions based on pattern recognition, a field which uses features or measurements to draw conclusions about a subject", explains Oommen, who received a Master's of Engineering in India before obtaining a PhD from Purdue University.

Oommen proposed to the delegation to investigate several potential wine industry-related problems, such as the type of grape best suited for a specific location based on soil characteristics and the types of grapes grown in neighbouring vineyards.

His solutions could also help automate and simulate the age-old art of wine tasting.

Oommen anticipates ongoing collaboration on the project, which has not yet begun, when Astudillo completes his doctorate this year and returns to Chile.

Meanwhile, Oommen, who first came to Carleton in 1981, is philosophical about his global involvement: "It keeps you young - problem-solving."