Honavar serves on the Leadership Team of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.

[11] Honavar was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery for "outstanding scientific contributions to computing";[12] and elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his "distinguished research contributions and leadership in data science".

[14] Honavar was a professor of computer science at Iowa State University where he led the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory which he founded in 1990 and was instrumental in establishing an interdepartmental graduate program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (and served as its Chair during 2003–2005).

[17] Honavar's research has contributed to advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, causal inference, knowledge representation, neural networks, semantic web, big data analytics, and bioinformatics and computational biology.

[22] Honavar has been active in fostering national and international scientific collaborations in Artificial Intelligence, Data Sciences, and their applications in addressing national, international, and societal priorities in accelerating science, improving health, transforming agriculture through partnerships that bring together academia, non-profits, and industry.