Vasant Honavar

Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian born American computer scientist, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data science, causality, knowledge representation, bioinformatics and health informatics researcher and educator.
Biography.
Vasant Honavar was born at Poona, India in 1960 to Bhavani G. and Gajanan N. Honavar. He received his early education at the Vidya Vardhaka Sangha High School and M.E.S. College in Bangalore, India. He received a B.E. in electronics engineering 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 engineering 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 studied Artificial Intelligence and worked with Leonard Uhr.
In 2013, Honavar 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 faculties of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Informatics, Bioinformatics and Genomics, Neuroscience, and of Operations Research, and of an undergraduate program in Data Science. Honavar 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 served on the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium Council during 2014-2017, where he chaired the task force on Convergence of Data and Computing, and was a member of the task force on Artificial Intelligence. 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. In 2016, Honavar was selected as the first Sudha Murty Distinguished Visiting Chair of Neurocomputing and Data Science by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. In 2018, Honavar was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery for his outstanding scientific contributions to computing; and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his distinguished research contributions and leadership in data 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 300 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 has directly supervised the dissertation research of 34 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.
Honavar has held visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and at the Indian Institute of Science.
Honavar has been quite actively engaged in fostering national and international scientific collaborations in Artificial Intelligence, Data Sciences, and their applications in addressing national, international, and societal priorities, e.g., in accelerating science, improving health, transforming agriculture, advancing education, etc. through partnerships that bring together academia, non-profits, and industry.