Short Biography

Xiaohua Tony Hu (Ph.D, 1995) is a full professor and the founding Co-Director (2012-2018) of the NSF Industry and University Cooperative Research Center on Visual and Decision Informatics (NSF CVDI), the first National Big Data Center in USA. Tony is a scientist, educator and entrepreneur. He joined Drexel University in 2002. He founded the International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics (SCI indexed) in 2006. 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 is a pioneer and renowned scholar in big data, data mining and bioinformatics, and has made significant contributions to promote and commercialize the big data and data mining research in real world applications. He has published more than 300 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 and Industries Labs. He has obtained more than 14 Million US$ research funds and has graduated 31 Ph.D. students.

Tony is the founding Co-Director (2012-2018) of the NSF Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (NSF CVDI). 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.

Tony is a leader in the big data , data mining and bioinformatics international research community. He founded the IEEE International Confernece in Big Data in 2012 (IEEE BigData) and serves as the steering committee chair since then. The IEEE BigData conference is regarded as the most influential top-tier conference in the big data research community. He founded the IEEE International Conference in Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM) in 2007 and served as the steering committee chair since then. The IEEE BIBM conference is ranked as one of the best conferences in the bioinformatics and biomedicine research community.

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. 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.