Dr. Vasant Honavar Department of Computer Science honavar@cs ...

social phenomena – just as calculus provided Newton and his successors with a language for modeling physical
phenomena.
I was drawn to Computer Science because of the possibility of understanding biological, cognitive, and social phenomena
in terms of processes that acquire, store, retrieve, manipulate, and use information. I am passionate about introducing
students to algorithmic approaches to exploring fundamental questions in biological, cognitive, and social sciences and to
the challenges of developing information processing artifacts and software that can dramatically improve our quality of
life.
Teaching Style
My personal teaching style involves:
(a) Teaching what I enjoy learning – this ensures that the students sense my interest and excitement in the topic.
(b) Engaging students so that they become active participants in the learning process rather than passive observers
(“What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand” – Confucius).
(c) Setting the stage for the topic of study – We learn what we almost already know. Hence I find it useful to develop
complex idea or a proof through a succession of smaller steps.
(d) Setting clear and realistic goals – Students respond best, and learn most, from learning goals that are both
challenging and achievable. Assignments that are trivial are boring. Assignments that are excessively difficult can be
frustrating and intimidating.
(e) Letting students make mistakes and learn from them. Exploration and experimentation are essential to learning and
discovery and learning what does not work (and why) is as important as learning what works (and why).
(f) Accomodating different learning styles – Kolb identifies several learning styles. Some learn best from observations
and examples; others by acquiring general principles and knowledge of how to apply them in specific situations;
others by deducing and discovering general principles or theories; and yet others by doing – that is, by trying things,
making mistakes, and learning from them. I find it useful to develop course materials that exercise multiple learning
styles.
Teaching and Curriculum Development Experience
Over the past fourteen years, I have designed, developed, and taught undergraduate as well as graduate courses and
seminars in artificial intelligence, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, machine learning, data mining and
knowledge discovery, neural and evolutionary computation, computational learning theory, bioinformatics and
computational molecular biology. The material covered in the courses is chosen with an emphasis on concepts that are
likely to have a lasting impact on the discipline in the years to come. In addition to introducing students to a core body of
knowledge in the areas of study, these courses present such knowledge in the broader context of computer science as an
intellectual discipline and to develop the students into creative thinkers and problem-solvers, be it in academic research or
advanced technology development.
The undergraduate and graduate courses that I have developed and taught over the years introduce students to some of
the most challenging topics in computer science - involving the application of concepts and tools from the theory of
computation, design and analysis of algorithms, and design of software systems in the construction of intelligent artifacts:
computer programs that represent and reason with and about knowledge, acquire knowledge from interaction with their
environment, and discover and use regularities from data.
I developed (in 1991) and taught a combined upper level undergraduate and introductory graduate course in Artificial
Intelligence with emphasis on fundamental problems and approaches in the design of intelligent agents at a time when no
suitable textbook was available. Because no suitable textbook was available at the time, I developed all of the necessary
course material in the form of lecture notes. Some of these notes were adapted for use in similar courses at other
universities. In 1995, when Russell and Norvig’s textbook became available, I adopted it for use in this course with my
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