Vasant Honavar

Term of Service on the CCC Council: 2014 – 2017

Vasant Honavar is a Professor and Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology and Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics and of Neuroscience at Pennsylvania State University where he currently leads the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory and the Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics Initiative. Honavar has served as a Program Director in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division at the National Science Foundation (during 2010-2013) where he contributed to multiple programs including Information Integration and Informatics, Smart and Connected Health, and led the Big Data Science and Engineering Program. Prior to joining Pennsylvania State University, Honavar was Professor of Computer Science and of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory (during 1990-2013), and Chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Ph.D. program (during 2003-2005) at Iowa State University. He served on the National Institutes of Health study section on Biological Data Management and Analysis during 2002-2007. Honavar’s current research and teaching interests span Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Big Data Analytics, Computational Molecular Biology, Data Mining, Discovery Informatics, Information Integration, Knowledge Representation and Inference, Semantic Technologies, Health Informatics, Neuroinformatics, Social Informatics and Security Informatics. His research (documented in over 250 peer-reviewed publications) has contributed scalable approaches to learning predictive models from “big data” – including in particular, very large, distributed, semantically disparate, richly structured data (including tabular, sequence, network, relational, time series data); knowledge-based, statistical and network-based approaches to integrating information, Eliciting causal information from multiple sources of observational and experimental data; Selective sharing of knowledge across disparate knowledge bases; Representing and reasoning about preferences; Composing complex services from components; and applications in bioinformatics and computational molecular and systems biology. Honavar has graduated over 30 PhD students, many of whom are leaders in academia and industry. Honavar currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He has served as a general co-chair of the IEEE International Conference on Big Data (2014). Honavar earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990.