Prof. Xiaohua Tony Hu, Drexel University.

Xiaohua Tony Hu (Ph.D, 1995) is a full professor and the founding director of the data mining and bioinformatics lab at the College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University. He is also serving as the founding Co-Director of the NSF Center (I/U CRC) on Visual and Decision Informatics (NSF CVDI), IEEE Computer Society Bioinformatics and Biomedicine Steering Committee Chair, and IEEE Computer Society Big Data Steering Committee Chair. Tony is a scientist, teacher and entrepreneur. He joined Drexel University in 2002. He founded the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (SCI indexed) in 2006, International Journal of Granular Computing, Rough Sets and Intelligent Systems in 2008. Earlier, he worked as a research scientist in the world-leading R&D centers such as Nortel Research Center, and Verizon Lab (the former GTE labs). In 2001, he founded the DMW Software in Silicon Valley, California. He has a lot of experience and expertise to convert original ideas into research prototypes, and eventually into commercial products, many of his research ideas have been integrated into commercial products and applications in data mining fraud detection, database marketing.

Tony’s current research interests are in data/text/web mining, big data, bioinformatics, information retrieval and information extraction, social network analysis, healthcare informatics, rough set theory and application. He has published more than 240 peer-reviewed research papers in various journals, conferences and books such as various IEEE/ACM Transactions (IEEE/ACM TCBB, IEEE TFS, IEEE TDKE, IEEE TITB, IEEE SMC, IEEE Computer, IEEE NanoBioScience, IEEE Intelligent Systems), JIS, KAIS, CI, DKE, IJBRA, SIG KDD, IEEE ICDM, IEEE ICDE, SIGIR, ACM CIKM, IEEE BIBE, IEEE CICBC etc, co-edited 20 books/proceedings. He has received a few prestigious awards including the 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) Career award, the best paper award at the 2007 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the best paper award at the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, the 2010 IEEE Granular Computing Outstanding Contribution Awards, the 2007 IEEE Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Outstanding Contribution Award, the 2006 IEEE Granular Computing Outstanding Service Award, and the 2001 IEEE Data Mining Outstanding Service Award. He has also served as a program co-chair/conference co-chair of 14 international conferences/workshops and a program committee member in more than 80 international conferences in the above areas. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (SCI indexed), International Journal of Granular Computing, Rough Sets and Intelligent Systems, an associate editor/editorial board member of four international journals (KAIS, IJDWM, IJSOI and JCIB). His research projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), US Dept. of Education, the PA Dept. of Health, the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He has obtained more than US$8.0 million research grants in the past 8 years as PI or Co-PI (PIs of 7 NSF grants, PI of 1 IMLS grant in the last 8 years). He has graduated 13 Ph.D. students from 2006 to 2014 and is currently supervising 12 Ph.D. students.

Tony is the founding Co-Director of the NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (NSF CVDI), there are about 60 such centers nationwide supported by the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program in all the research disciplines covered by NSF. The CVDI is the “National Center of Excellence” to deal with the Big Data Challenges. The center is funded by NSF, the members from industry and government, and university matching funds. The current industry members and government agencies associated with Drexel University are: Children Hospital of Philadelphia, Elsevier, Institute of Museum and Library, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft Research, Penn Dept. of Health, Thomson Reuters, SunGuard LLP, Lockheed Martin, IMS Healthcare and SOI. The CVDI serves to drive continuous innovation through knowledge sharing among partners leading to invention and commercialization of information and knowledge engineering technologies for decision support, research and develop next generation data mining, visual and decision support tools & techniques to enable decision makers in government and industry to fundamentally improve the way their organization’s information is interpreted and analyzed. Currently, there are about 30 faculty and staff from Drexel University and University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and 12 industry companies/government agencies participated in various research projects.

Tony has 8 years solid industry R& D experience and has converted many original research ideas into research prototype systems and eventually into commercial products. In his Ph.D. thesis (1995, University of Regina) entitled “Knowledge Discovery in Databases: An Attribute-Oriented Rough Set Approach”, he introduced the rough set theory to data mining research and developed an attribute-oriented rough set approach for data mining and designed a research prototype system DBROUGH, which was later successfully transferred to the industry in Canada. From 1994-1998, he was a research scientist in data mining in Nortel Network Research Center, GTE Labs (Verizon Labs) etc. He had worked in many data mining related projects for real-time telephone switch system diagnosis, data managements, and wireless churn prediction. Among them, the CHAMP (CHurn Analysis, Modeling and Prediction) project was nominated for GTE’s highest technical achievement award in 1997. From 1998-2002, he had designed and developed data mining commercial software in various start-up companies (KSP, Blue Martini Software), KSP was acquired by Exchange Applications for $52 million in April 2000. In 2001, Tony founded the company DMW software (Data Mining and Warehousing) in Silicon Valley, California. He has successfully deployed a few data mining products/systems to some Fortune 100 companies such as Chase, Citibank, Sprint for credit fraud detection, e-personalization and customer management systems.