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Vasant Honavar: Biographical Sketch
Dr. Vasant Honavar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, in 1990 from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he worked with Professor Leonard Uhr and specializsd in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Neural Computation. In September 2013, Honavar joined the faculty of Penn State University where he currently serves as a Professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Science and Technology. He directs the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics and serves as an associate director of the Institute for Cyberscience. He co-directs the Penn State NIH BD2K Predoctoral Training Program in Biomedical Data Sciences and the Informatics thrust of the Penn State Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He is also on the facultes of graduate programs in Informatics, Computer Science and Engineering, Bioinformatics and Genomics, Neuroscience, and Operations Research, and the Undergraduate program in Data Sciences. He is a member of the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences, the Institute for Cyberscience, the Penn State Cancer Institute, the Penn State Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, and the Penn State Population Research Institute.
In 2016, Honavar was appointed as the Sudha Murty Distinguished Visiting Chair of Neurocomputing and Data Science at the Indian Institute of Science. Honavar served as a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council (CCC) where he chaired the Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force (2015-2017) and served on Artificial Intelligence and Health IT task forces. He continues to serve as an external member of the Data and Computing Task force. Dr. Honavar serves on the Executive Committee of the NSF North East Big Data Innovation Hub and the Board of Directors of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics. In addition to research, graduate student supervision and teaching, he is responsible for developing new research and educational initiatives in Data Sciences and contributing to research initiatives in Biomedical and Health Sciences.
Honavar's current research and teaching interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Big Data Analytics, Computational Molecular Biology, Data Mining, Discovery Informatics Information Integration, Knowledge Representation and Inference, Semantic Technologies, Social Informatics, Security Informatics, and Health Informatics. Honavar has led research projects funded by grants totaling over $60 million from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Agriculture, and the US Department of Defense that have resulted in foundational research contributions (documented in 3 books and in over 300 peer-reviewed publications, that have been cited over 13,500 times during 1990-2019, h-index=56) in: scalable approaches to learning predictive models from very large, richly structured data (including tabular, sequence, network, relational, time series data); Eliciting causal information from multiple sources of observational and experimental data, Selective sharing of knowledge across disparate knowledge bases, including novel approaches to secrecy- preserving query answering; Representing and reasoning about preferences; Eliciting causal effects from observational and experimental data; Composing complex software services from components; and applications in bioinformatics and computational molecular and systems biology (including characterization, analysis, and prediction of protein-protein, and protein-RNA interfaces, interactions and complexes, integrative analyses of multi-omics data; biomarker discovery from microbiome data; biomarker discovery from fMRI data; computational epitope prediction). This research has resulted in a broad range of software and tools (See http://ailab.ist.psu.edu/software.html).
Honavar's current research is focused on:
(1) Computational abstractions scientific artifacts (e.g., data, knowledge, hypotheses), and universes of scientific discourse (e.g., biology), and scientific processes (e.g., hypothesis generation, predictive modeling, experimentation, simulation, and hypothesis testing), cognitive tools that augment and extend human intellect; and human- machine cyberinfrastructure (including organizational structures and processes) to accelerate science; Design and analysis of algorithms for predictive modeling from very large, high dimensional, richly structured, multi-modal, longitudinal data; Elucidation of causal relationships from disparate experimental and observational studies; Elucidation of causal relationships from relational, temporal, and temporal-relational data; Design and analyses of accountable, explainable, and fair AI systems; Analysis and prediction of macromolecular interactions, elucidation of complex biological pathways e.g., those involved in immune response, development, and disease; Predictive and causal modeling of individual and population health outcomes from behavioral, biomedical, clinical, environmental, socio-demographic data; Predictive and causal modeling of behavioral and cognitive systems in naturalistic settings; and Modeling the structure, activity, and function of brain networks from fMRI and other types of data.
From 1990 to 2013, Honavar served on the faculty of Computer Science and of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Iowa State University (ISU). At ISU, he directed the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory (which he founded in 1990) and the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning & Discovery (which he founded in 2005) and served as the associate chair (2001-2003) and chair (2003-2005) of the ISU Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program, which he helped establish in 1999 with support from an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award.
During 2010-2013, Honavar served as a program director in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) during 2010-2013 while maintaining his research program at ISU. He led the Big Data Science and Engineering Program, established the NSF-OFR collaboration in Computational and Information Processing Approaches to and Infrastructure in support of, Financial Research and Analysis and Management, contributed to Smart and Connected Health, Information Integration and Informatics, Expeditions in Computing, Science of Learning Centers, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training, Computing Research Infrastructure Programs.
From 1990 to 2013, Honavar served on the faculty of Computer Science and of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Iowa State University (ISU). At ISU, he directed the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory (which he founded in 1990) and the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning & Discovery (which he founded in 2005) and served as the associate chair (2001-2003) and chair (2003-2005) of the ISU Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program, which he helped establish in 1999 with support from an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award.
During 2010-2013, Honavar served as a program director in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) during 2010-2013 while maintaining his research program at ISU. He led the Big Data Science and Engineering Program, established the NSF-OFR collaboration in Computational and Information Processing Approaches to and Infrastructure in support of, Financial Research and Analysis and Management, contributed to Smart and Connected Health, Information Integration and Informatics, Expeditions in Computing, Science of Learning Centers, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training, Computing Research Infrastructure Programs.
Honavar has extensive teaching and curriculum development experience in Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Data Sciences, and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. He has designed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses and seminars in Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Computational Systems Biology, Machine Learning, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Causal Inference, Informatics, Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Knowledge Representation and Inference, Semantic Web and related topics. He has developed and presented tutorials at conferences on on several of these topics.
Honavar has served on, or currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Cognitive Systems Research, Machine Learning, the Journal of Bioinformatics and Biology Insights, the International Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems, the International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design, the International Journal of Computer and Information Security, and the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, and Webmed Central.
Honavar has served as the program chair of several conferences and symposia, including the AAAI/CCC Fall Symposium on Accelerating Science: A Grand Challenge for Artificial Intelligence (2016), IEEE Conference on Big Data (2014), as well as numerous workshops e.g., the ACM Workshop on Immunoinformatics and Computational Immunology (in conjunction with the ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (2014)), and the Workshop on Discovery Informatics in Discovery Informatics in Biological and Biomedical Sciences: Research Challenges and Opportunities in (in conjunction with the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 2015)).
Honavar has served as Area Chair of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and senior program committee member or program committee member of major research conferences in artificial intelligence, data mining, and bioinformatics including the Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), SIAM Conference on Data Mining (SDM), IEEE Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology (ISMB), ACM Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ACM-BCB), among others. Honavar has served as a charter member of the National Institutes of Health study section on Biological Data Management and Analysis (2002-2007).
Honavar is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, American Medical Informatics Association, International Machine Learning Society, Society for Neuroscience, New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi.
Honavar has received many awards and honors during his career including election as a fellow of AAAS (for research and leadership in Data Sciences) (2018) and as Distingusihed Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (2018), the Sudha Murty Distinguished Visiting Chair in Neurocomputing and Data Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (2016-), the Pennsylvania State University College of Information Sciences and Technology Senior Faculty Research Excellence Award (2016), the Edward Frymoyer Endowed Professorship in Informatin Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Superior Accomplishment (2013) for his leadership of the NSF Big Data Program, the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Collaborative Integration (2011), the Iowa Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2007, the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Career Excellence in Research 2008, and the Iowa State University Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award in 2011. However, his proudest accomplishments are the 34 PhD students, 25 MS Students and several undergraduate researchers that he has worked with and mentored during his career.
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