Dr. Aparna Varde is a Tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Montclair State University, NJ, USA. She obtained her PhD and MS in Computer Science, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Massachusetts, USA; and her BE in Computer Engineering from the University of Bombay, India. Dr. Varde has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrucken, Germany. Her research spans Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Database Systems with particular emphasis on multi-disciplinary work. She is a Doctoral Faculty Member in the PhD Program in Environmental Science and Management at Montclair State University. Dr. Varde has around 100 publications including journals, conferences, book chapters and edited volumes. Her current topics of interest encompass Commonsense Knowledge, Smart Cities, Geo-informatics and Text Mining.

Dr. Varde's recent honors include 4 best paper awards at IEEE conferences. She has earlier been awarded an Associate Membership of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society for excellence in multidisciplinary work. She is the founder of PIKM: PhD workshop in ACM CIKM and has chaired these in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014. She has also chaired the PhD Forum in IEEE ICDM 2013. She has served on the Program Committee of various conferences, e.g., W3C's WWW, NAACL-HLT, ACM's CIKM & EDBT, IEEE's ICDM & ICTAI, SIAM's SDM, Springer's DEXA and has been a reviewer for journals including IEEE's TDKE, ACM's TKDD, Elsevier's DKE, Springer's DMKD and ACM's VLDB journal.

Dr. Varde has been the dissertation advisor for 2 PhD students in Environmental Science and Management, and the research advisor for many MS and BS students in Computer Science. She has also been the advisor for 1 PhD student as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar in Computer Science at Montclair, an internal PhD committee member for 3 PhD students at Montclair, and an external committee member for 4 PhD students from institutions worldwide (including Queeensland University of Technology, Australia). Dr. Varde has served as a panelist for NSF's Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovations Program (CDI) in the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) division. Her research is supported by grants from organizations such as PSE&G and NSF, USA. Her prior experience includes being a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in the Department of Math and Computer Science at Virginia State University, VA; and Software Engineer in multi-national companies such as Lucent Technologies and Citicorp. Dr. Varde is classified as an outstanding researcher by the Citizenship and Immigration Services, USA.

Spans Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Database Systems with particular emphasis on multi-disciplinary work.

Artificial Intelligence - Commonsense Knowledge, Smart Cities, App Development with HCI & IoT, Implicit Requirements in Software Engineering, Collaborative Robotics, Expert Systems, Information Retrieval

Machine Learning and Data Mining - Predictive Analytics, Decision Support Systems, Domain-Specific Knowledge Discovery, Text Mining and Linguistics Issues, Scientific Data Analysis

Database Systems - Big Data Management, Cloud Computing, Web Databases, XML and DSML

Environmental Computing (Env. Sc. & Mgmt. PhD Program) - Green IT, Urban Policy, Geo-informatics