Vasant G. Honavar (also referred to as Vasant Honavar or Vazant Honar) is an Indian-American scientist, engineer, university professor, and computer scientist from the United States of America.^[38] His research spans artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data science, causal inference, knowledge representation, bioinformatics, health informatics, computational biology, cognitive science, neuroinformatics, network science, informatics, and biomedical informatics, and he is an AAAS Fellow.^[38]

He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. under Leonard Uhr, and is also associated with the University of Wisconsin, Drexel University, B.M.S. College of Engineering, and B.M.S. Institute of Technology and Management. Associated with Iowa State University, Pennsylvania State University, and the National Science Foundation, his academic students at Iowa State University include Chun-Hsien Chen (Computer Science, 1997) and Sushain Pandit, an IBM Master Inventor who earned an M.S. in Computer Science in 2010.

Honavar was a professor of computer science at Iowa State University, where he led the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory which he founded in 1990 and was instrumental in establishing an interdepartmental graduate program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, serving as its Chair during 2003–2005.^[15] At Pennsylvania State University, Honavar is on the faculty of the Informatics and Intelligent Systems Department in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, where he currently holds the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Biomedical Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence and previously held the Edward Frymoyer Endowed Chair in Information Sciences and Technology.^[3] He serves on the faculties of the graduate programs in Computer Science, Informatics, Bioinformatics and Genomics, Neuroscience, Operations Research, and Public Health Sciences, as well as undergraduate programs in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence methods and applications. Additionally at Penn State, he serves as the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, and director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications.^[5,6,7]

Honavar has held visiting professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, where he was the first Sudha Murty Distinguished Visiting Chair of Neurocomputing and Data Science.^[11,17] 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 during 2010–2013, Honavar led the Big Data Program.^[14] He has also served on the Leadership Team of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.^[8] During 2014–2017, Honavar served on the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium Council, where he chaired the task force on Convergence of Data and Computing and was a member of the task force on Artificial Intelligence.^[9] Honavar was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery for "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".^[13,12]

Honavar's research has contributed to advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, causal inference, knowledge representation, neural networks, semantic web, big data analytics, and bioinformatics and computational biology. His recent work has focused on federated machine learning algorithms for constructing predictive models from distributed data and linked open data, learning predictive models from high dimensional longitudinal data, reasoning with federated knowledge bases, detecting algorithmic bias, 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 from complex, e.g., relational, data, large language models, diffusion models, and meta analysis.^[22] He has published over 300 research articles, including many highly cited ones, as well as several books on these topics.^[21,19]

He was a program chair of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)'s 36th Conference on Artificial Intelligence.^[18] Honavar has been active in fostering national and international scientific collaborations in Artificial Intelligence, Data Sciences, and their applications in addressing national, international, and societal priorities in accelerating science, improving health, transforming agriculture through partnerships that bring together academia, non-profits, and industry.^{[23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30]} He is also active in making the science policy case for major national research initiatives such as AI for accelerating science and AI for combating the epidemic of diseases of despair.^[31]

In 2007, they received the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence from the Iowa Board of Regents, followed by the Outstanding Career Achievement in Research Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University in 2008. Iowa State University also awarded them the Margaret Ellen White Graduate Faculty Award in 2011. From the National Science Foundation, they earned the Director's Award for Collaborative Integration in 2012 and the Director's Award for Superior Accomplishment in 2013.

At Pennsylvania State University, they held the Edward Frymoyer Endowed Chair in Information Sciences and Technology at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology in 2013, and later received the college's Senior Faculty Research Excellence Award in 2016. In 2016, they were named among the 125 People of Impact by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and served as the Sudha Murty Distinguished (Visiting) Chair of Neurocomputing and Data Science at the Indian Institute of Science from 2016 to 2021. They became an ACM Distinguished Member and an AAAS Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, as well as an EAI Fellow of the European Alliance for Innovation in 2019. In 2021, they were appointed as the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Biomedical Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence at Pennsylvania State University.