Quick Facts
Biography
John Yen is University Professor and Director of Strategic Research Initiatives in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He is also the co-founder and the Director of the Cancer Informatics Initiative there.
Yen's current research goals are (1) improving our understanding about principles regarding the dynamics of online social networking, facilitated by social media and online communities, and developing theories and methods to model, simulate, and predict social contagion and their impacts using distributed machine learning in cloud, (2) capturing and modeling human experience in software agents for supporting decision making.
Yen has been a Principal investigator or co-Principal investigator of several multimillion-dollar research projects on these topics. Sponsors of his research projects include National Science Foundation, Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Department of Energy.
Yen received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. His thesis advisor is Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic. Between 1986 and 1989, he was the main architect at USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for an AI architecture that pioneers a knowledge-level integration of a descriptive logic knowledge representation scheme with production rules. Before joining IST in 2001, he was a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Center for Fuzzy Logic, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems at Texas A&M University. He was the Vice President of Publication for IEEE Neural Networks Council, now IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Yen received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1992. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Yen received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1980, and M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Santa Clara in 1982.
Books
- Emergent Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism, by Robert L. Popp, John Yen, 2006 (Amazon)
- Fuzzy Logic: Intelligence, Control, and Information, by John Yen and Reza Langari, 1998 (Amazon)