Jun Zhang and Changhui Yan receive Iowa State University Research Excellence Awards

December 20, 2005
News

Jun Zhang and Changhui Yan have been awarded the Iowa State University's Graduate Research Excellence Awards. The award honors students whose research accomplishments place them among the top 10 percent of all graduate students at Iowa State University. 
 

Jun Zhang completed his Ph.D. studies in Computer Science under the supervision of Vasant Honavar in the fall of 2005. His work in the Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory has led to the development of ontology aware learning algorithms that can exploit prior knowledge in the form of taxonomies defined over attribute values to construct concise and accurate classifiers from partially specified data, with applications in scientific data mining and semantic web. Jun has published 9 refereed conference or journal publications based on his thesis research. Jun has accepted a position as a data mining research scientist at Fair Isaac at San Diego. 
 

Changhui Yan completed his Ph.D. studies in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology with a co-major in Computer Science under the joint supervision of Vasant Honavar and Drena Dobbs in the fall of 2005. His work in the Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory has led to the development and application of machine learning algorithms for characterization and prediction of protein-protein, protein-DNA, and protein-RNA interfaces. Changhui has published 5 refereed conference or journal publications based on his thesis research, and has several journal submissions that are currently under review. Changhui has accepted a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Utah State University.