Dr. Virendrakumar C. Bhavsar is an Honorary Research Professor and Professor
Emeritus at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of New Brunswick (UNB),
Fredericton, Canada. At present, he is a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of
Technology, Dharwad, Karnataka. He was the Dean of the Faculty and founding Director
of the Advanced Computational Laboratory (ACRL). He is a Fellow of the International
Institute of Cognitive Informatics and Cognitive Computing, Calgary, Canada. He
received a B.Eng. (Electronics and Telecommunications) from University of Poona, and
an M.Tech. (Electrical Eng.) and Ph.D. (Electrical Eng.) from the Indian Institute of
Technology (IIT) Bombay. He was a faculty member at the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay from 1976 to 1983 and since then has been at the
UNB. He is the President of the SAI: Super and Intelligent Computer Systems, Inc. in
Fredericton, Canada. He has been a consultant to industries in the areas of semantic web,
semantic search and matchmaking, artificial intelligence, and high performance
computing.
He co-led the bioinformatics component of the Canadian Potato Genomics project. He
also led the New Brunswick component of the Atlantic Computational Excellence
Network (ACEnet) – a $30+ million high performance computing initiative in Atlantic
Canada. ACRL and ACEnet have offered high performance computing (HPC) resources
and high performance software development support to researchers at UNB, and other
universities in the Atlantic Canada as well as the rest of Canada. He was a founding
member of the Board of Directors of C3.ca Inc. – a high performance computing
initiative in Canada.
He was the Chair of the IEEE New Brunswick section and the Vice-President of the
Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) New Brunswick section.
He has carried out research over 45+ years in almost all areas of computer science and
engineering. While at IIT Bombay, he led the development of Plexus parallel computer-
one of the first multi-microcomputer computing systems in India. He has published 170+
research papers in journals and conference proceedings, many book chapters and
technical reports, and has edited four volumes. He has organized many national and
international conferences as well as workshops. He also has given numerous invited talks
in national/international conferences and universities around the world. His current
research interests include artificial intelligence include deep learning for natural language
processing, text-to-scene conversion, semantic matching and matchmaking and their
applications in e-Business and e-Health, and Big Data storage and retrieval in spatio-
temporal databases.