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. Honavar was honored with a Faculty Excellence Award by the Iowa Board of Regents (2007) and an Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in Research by the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2008).

Honavar founded (in 1990) and has been the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory at Iowa State University. He directs the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning & Discovery which he founded in 2005. Honavar is on the faculty of interdepartmental graduate programs in bioinformatics and computational biology, Human-Computer Interaction, Neuroscience, and Information Assurance. He has served as the associate chair (2001-2003) and chair (2003-2005) of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Graduate Program which he helped establish at ISU with support from an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award from the National Science Foundation. Fourteen Ph.D. students and twentyone M.S. students have graduated under Honavar's supervision.

Honavar's research and teaching interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, Computational Molecular Biology, Intelligent Agents and Multi-agent systems, Collaborative Information Systems, Semantic Web, Environmental Informatics, Security Informatics, Social Informatics, Neural Computation, Systems Biology, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery and Visualization. Honavar has published over 200 research articles in refereed journals, conferences and books, and has co-authored or co-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 a co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cognitive Systems Research. He has served on, or currently serves on the editorial boards of the Machine Learning Journal, 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.

Honavar has served as the program chair of several conferences and symposia including: the AAAI Fall Symposium on Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition (2006), the Fourth Conference on Computational Biology and Genome Informatics (2002), and the Fourth International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (1998). He has organized several workshops, including the Workshop on Semantic Web for Collaborative Knowledge Acquisition (SWeCKa 2007), Workshop on Modular Ontologies, IEEE Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition from Distributed, Autonomous, Semantically Heterogeneous, Data Sources, Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Heterogeneous, Distributed, Dynamic, Autonomous Data Sources, Workshop on Learning from Sequential and Temporal Data, the Workshop on Computation with Neural Systems, and the Workshop on Automata Induction, Grammatical Inference, and Language Acquisition held in conjunction with ICML 97.

Honavar has served on the program committees of several major conferences in artificial intelligence, data mining, and bioinformatics including in particular, 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), IEEE Conference on Tools With Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), ACM/IEEE Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT), IEEE International Conference on Digital Information Management, International Colloquium on Grammatical Inference (ICGI), International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT), International Conference on Genetic Programming (GP), Conference on Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology, (ISMB), IEEE Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE), IEEE Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), Workshop on Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), among others.

Honavar has served as a PI or Co-PI on research grants totaling approximately $18.0 million from various sources including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health million during 1990-2008. He currently serves as a PI or co-PI on grants totaling approximately $7.2 million (PI on $2 million). Honavar has extensive curriculum development and teaching experience in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Bioinformatics. Honavar is a member of the National Institutes of Health study section on Biological Data Management and Analysis. Prof. Honavar is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and the New York Academy of Sciences, and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

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 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.