Vasant Honavar: Biographical Sketch

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. He joined the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University in 1990 where he is presently a full professor. He was chosen for a Faculty Excellence Award by the Iowa Board of Regents in 2007.

Honavar is also on the faculty of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Neuroscience, and Information Assurance graduate programs as well as the Complex Adaptive Systems graduate minor. He has served as the chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology graduate program and the Bioinformatics project director of the Computational Molecular Biology training group funded by a National Science Foundation IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training) award at Iowa State University.

Honavar's current research and teaching interests include: artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics and computational biology, computational systems biology, information integration, knowledge representation and inference, ontologies, neural computation, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, machine perception, security informatics, chemical informatics, materials informatics, medical informatics and social informatics.

Honavar founded and directs the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning, and Discovery at Iowa State University. He is also the founder (and director) of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory. Some of the research in this laboratory has been supported through research grants from National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Electric Power Research Institute, the John Deere Foundation, the Carver Foundation, the Iowa State University Council on International Programs, and Iowa State University, as well as fellowships and research assistantships funded by the IBM Corporation, and the Iowa State University Graduate College.

Honavar has published over 180 refereed papers in journals and conferences and 10 invited book chapters on these topics. He has also edited several books including: Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks: Steps Toward Principled Integration (with Prof. Leonard Uhr), published by Academic Press in 1994; Grammatical Inference (Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 1433) (with Giora Slutzki) published by Springer-Verlag in 1998; Evolutionary Synthesis of Intelligent Agents (with his former Ph.D. student Karthik Balakrishnan and Mukesh Patel) published by MIT Press in 2001.

Honavar is an editor-in-chief of the Cognitive Systems Research which is published by Elsevier. Honavar has served on the editorial board of Machine Learning journal. He guest edited (with Colin de la Higuera) a special issue of the Machine Learning on automata induction, grammar inference, and language acquisition. Honavar currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics and Internatuional Journal of Information and Computer Security.

Honavar served as the program chair of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition. Honavar served as the program chair of the Fourth Conference on Computational Biology and Genome Informatics (CBGI-2002) to be held at Durham, North Carolina in March 2002. Honavar was the program chair for the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference which was held at Iowa State University in Ames in July 1998.

Honavar has organized several workshops, the most recent being the Workshop on Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition (SWeCKa 2007) held in conjunction with the 2007 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Workshop on Modular Ontologies, held in conjunction with the 2006 International Semantic Web Conference, IEEE Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from Distributed, Autonomous, Semantically Heterogeneous, Data Sources held in conjunction with the 2005 IEEE Conference on Data Mining, Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Heterogeneous, Distributed, Dynamic, Autonomous Data Sources held in conjunction with International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2001), Workshop on Cognitive Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions held in conjuction with International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS 2001), Workshop on Learning from Sequential and Temporal Data, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2000), the Workshop on Computation with Neural Systems, held in conjunction with the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 99), and the Workshop on Automata Induction, Grammatical Inference, and Language Acquisition held in conjunction with ICML 97.

Honavar serves as a referee for several journals including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Expert, Connection Science, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, Neural Computation, Information Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Applied Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, Machine Vision and Applications, Connection Science, and Neural Networks.

Honavar has served on program committees of numerous conferences, the most recent ones being the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2006), International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2006), 8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery (DaWaK 06), IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2005), International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2005)IEEE Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2005), IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2004), IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2004), the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2004), the the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE 2004), the International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI 2004), IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology,.

Honavar has designed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Computational Systems Biology, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and seminars in Bioinformatics, Cognitive and Neural Modeling, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and Ontologies, Semantic Web, Computational Systems Biology, Information Integration, and related topics. He has developed and presented tutorials on several topics in Intelligent Agents and Multiagent Systems, and Machine Learning.

Honavar is a senior member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), American Medical Informatics Association, International Machine Learning Society, Cognitive Science Society, Society for Neuroscience, Neural Network Society, New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi and an associate of Behavior and Brain Sciences. He regularly serves as a consultant on topics in Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Bioinformatics, Data Integration, Semantic Web, and related areas.