Professor Vasant G. Honavar, Edward Frymoyer Chair of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), has been named Sudha Murty Distinguished Visiting Chair in Neurocomputing and Data Science at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore in India.
The distinguished visiting chair will support Honavar’s visits to IISc Bangalore, and visits of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty between IISc and Penn State. It will also support workshops to foster collaborative research in neurocomputing and data sciences. Honavar plans to return to the IISc campus approximately three to four weeks every year during his appointment.
“IISc is widely regarded as a top institution in India for advanced scientific research and education, and ranks among the top such institutions in the world,” said Honavar. “I felt honored when I was approached by IISc for this Visiting Chair.”
The distinguished visiting chair, a three-year appointment, is the second of three at IISc. The chair is funded by the Pratiksha Trust, which was established in 2015 by Infosys Foundation co-founder Senapathy “Kris” Gopalakrishnan and his wife, Sudha.
“The visiting chair professorships are aimed at bringing stellar researchers in the areas of neurocomputing, computational neuroscience, machine Learning, and data science to the IISc to help create a vibrant research ecosystem,” said IISc director Anurag Kumar. “The initiative is expected to foster intense research collaboration between world renowned researchers in the above areas and the research community at several departments and centers of the Indian Institute of Science.”
In addition to his new appointment, Honavar is IST’s director of the Center for Big Data Analytics and Discovery Informatics, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory, and associate director of the Institute of Cyberscience. He also serves on the faculties of graduate programs in Bioinformatics and Genomics and Neuroscience, and co-directs an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Biomedical Data Sciences.
“I am looking forward to collaborating with my IISc colleagues and the other visiting chairs at IISc, and being part of the international research network at the intersection of data sciences and brain sciences,” said Honavar. “I am grateful to Kris and Sudha Gopalakrishnan and my IISc colleagues for this opportunity, as the planned collaborations strongly complement the research and educational initiatives in Data Sciences and related areas that I am pursuing with colleagues across multiple institutes, colleges, and departments at Penn State.”
“I am sure that Professor Honavar will add a new dimension to research collaboration in key strategic areas between IISc researchers and leading contributors to these areas around the world,” added Kumar.