Vasant Honavar

Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian born American computer scientist, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bioinformatics and Health Informatics researcher and educator. In 2013, he joined the faculty of Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University where he holds the Edward Frymoyer endowed professorship and serves on the faculty of graduate programs in Computer Science, Information Sciences and Technology, Bioinformatics and Genomics, Neuroscience, and of Operations Research. Honavar also serves as the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, Associate Director of the Institute for Cyberscience and the Director of the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics at Pennsylvania State University. Honavar serves on the Executive Board of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub. Honavar serves on the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium Council. In 2015, Honavar was elected to the Electorate Nominating Committee of the Information, Computing, and Communication Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Honavar is known for his research contributions in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, knowledge representation, neural networks, semantic web, big data analytics, and bioinformatics and computational biology. He has published over 250 research articles, including many highly cited ones, as well as several books on these topics. His recent work has focused on scalable algorithms for constructing predictive models from large, semantically disparate distributed data, learning predictive models from linked open data, big data analytics, analysis and prediction of protein-protein, protein-RNA, and protein-DNA interfaces and interactions, social network analytics, health informatics, secrecy-preserving query answering, representing and reasoning about preferences, and causal inference and meta analysis.

Honavar is a highly sought after mentor of Ph.D. students. He has directly supervised the dissertation research of 31 Ph.D. students, all of whom have gone onto pursue successful research careers in academia, industry, or government.

During 1990-2013, Honavar was a professor of computer science at Iowa State University where he led the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory which he founded in 1990. From 2006 to 2013, he served as the director of the Iowa State University Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery which he founded in 2006. He was instrumental in establishing the Iowa State University interdepartmental graduate program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (and served as its Chair during 2003-2005).

During 2010-2013, Honavar served as a Program Director in the Information Integration and Informatics program in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the US National Science Foundation where he led the Big Data Program and contributed to several core and cross-cutting programs.

He has held visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Early life

Honavar received a B.E. in Electronics Engg. from B.M.S. College of Engineering in Bangalore, India in 1982, when it was affiliated with Bangalore University, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engg. in 1984 from Drexel University, and an M.S. in Computer Science in 1989, and a Ph.D. in 1990, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he worked with Leonard Uhr.

Selected publications and books

• Vasant Honavar and Leonard Uhr. (Ed.) Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks: Steps Toward Principled Integration. New York: Academic Press. 1994. ISBN 0-12-355055-6
• Vasant Honavar and Giora Slutzki (Ed). Grammatical Inference. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 1998. ISBN 3-540-64776-7
• Mukesh Patel, Vasant Honavar and Karthik Balakrishnan (Ed). Advances in the Evolutionary Synthesis of Intelligent Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2001. ISBN 0-262-16201-6

Honors

• National Science Foundation Director's Award for Superior Accomplishment, 2013
• National Science Foundation Director's Award for Collaborative Integration, 2012
• Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award, Iowa State University, 2011
• Outstanding Career Achievement in Research Award, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Iowa State University, 2008
• Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, Iowa Board of Regents, 2007

External links

• Personal home page

• "Vasant Honavar's Official Web Page at Pennsylvania State University"
• "Interdisciplinary Center Seeks to Leverage the Power of Big Data Analytics