John Yen

Who is John Yen?

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 Director of the Intelligent Agents Laboratory, and a founding member of the Cancer Informatics Initiative there.

Yen's current research goals are 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, capturing and modeling human experience in software agents for supporting decision making.

Yen has been a Principal investigator or co-Principal investigator of several multi-million-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.