Contact

Associate Professor, Indiana University at Bloomington (IU)

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Engineering,
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Informatics in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington and
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Indianapolis
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1262-5927

Directing the AI & NLP Lab and the Quantum AI Lab.

phone: +1 (812) 856-5094 (or via Signal, Teams, Zoom)
email: dcavar at the domain where we all are, here at IU (iu.edu) (OpenPGP key)
communication: Signal, Element, LinkedIn, Call sign KD9POS
code: GitHub
publications: ACL Anthology, Google Scholar, AI & NLP Lab, local: publications and talks
office hours: During the semester Thursdays 4:00-5:00 PM in my Ballantine Hall 511 (or arranged other location)

2026:

Faculty Innovation Ambassador (FIA) - selected by the Innovation and Commercialization Office (ICO) of Indiana University as one of the inaugural Faculty Innovation Ambassadors (FIA).
Quantum Research Network (QRN) Co-chair - Indiana University Quantum Research Network

My research is inspired by Steve Jobs’ vision from 1985.

Address: Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Room 511, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.

Adjunct/Member:

Adjunct Professor in the Department of Engineering and
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Informatics in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Indianapolis
Luddy Artificial Intelligence Center Core Faculty, Indiana University at Bloomington
IU Quantum Science and Engineering Center
Data Science Faculty in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research (CACR) Fellow at Indiana University
Indiana University Hutton Honors College’s Inaugural Faculty House Fellow 2025/2026 (MAUNA KEA: Hutton House Program)
Russian and East-European Institute (REEI), Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, Indiana University
Member of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University
Adjunct in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Member:

Senior Lifetime Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Special Interest Group for Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI)
• Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (Senior Member)
• IEEE Computer Society member
• IEEE Systems Council member
• IEEE Quantum Technical Community (QTC) member
• Quantum Technical Community, IEEE Computer Society
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
• Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing (SIGSLAV)
The Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI)
W3C Procedural Memory Knowledge Representation Community Group

Certificates

Biomedical Researcher Certificate (07-Jul-2022-06-Jul-2027), certificate record ID: 49987962, CITI Program, Requirements set by Indiana University/IU Health
2022-2025 HIPAA Privacy & Security Training, Indiana University
2025-2026 Research Security Certificate, Indiana University
2021 (Class of) National Security Innovations Network (NSIN) Defense Innovation Accelerator (DIA) program certificate
Google Project Management Certificate (in prep)
PMP Certification from PMI (in prep)

Events

Cavar, D. (11/06/2026) Beyond Real-Valued AI: Complex-Valued Transformers for Hybrid Classical–Quantum Computing CBIRD: Complex Bidirectional Inducer for Representation Dynamics, talk at the Computer Science Colloquium, Luddy School, IUB, 3pm at Dorsey Auditorium, Luddy Hall 1106.
Cavar, D., Daniel Quigley, Sam Gray Miller (2026) Quantum Computing with AI Embeddings and Training of Hybrid Classical/Quantum AI Models (MLMs and LLMs). Tutorial at the 2026 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) in Nottingham, UK.
I organized the Quantum AI Conference 2026 at Indiana University Indianapolis in August 2026.
Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT) Meeting 2026 at Notre Dame - presenting CBIRD - Hybrid Classical-Quantum Language and World Models for AI, 1st of April, 2026
Participation at the NSF LEVEL UP AI workshop in Phoenix, AZ.
Presentation on “Optimizing Data Structures for Hybrid Classical and Quantum Computing for AI and NLP” and discussion at the iQafé event on December 18th, 2025.
Me and Danny Valdez are giving a talk at the IU Indianapolis Artificial Intelligence & Informatics Consortium (AI2) Events on the 22nd of October 2025, “Toward dynamic surveillance of drug communication on social media: From descriptive insights to predictive modeling with AI architectures,” on analyzing social media data using AI Agentive Models, Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, Ontologies, and how to expand existing resources from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Drugs dictionary with new street terminology and insights generated from drug abuse posts on social media. Topics: AI, NLP, Reasoning in Medical Research Applications
I was organizing the Quantum AI Conference 2025 at Indiana University in August 2025.

Activities

The Complex Bidirectional Integration for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD) is a Language Model trained to be a fully hybrid classical/quantum model, which can be used on CPU/GPU and QPU systems without encoding loss, usable as a state-of-the-art text diffusion model, as a BERT-style bidirectional encoder-only model.
The Dove Recovery House - Indiana Site Selection Analysis Data Science project material is available online (Substance use, Women-centered care, Access to care, Jasper, Dubois County, Indiana, Rural Engagement)
I launched the environment for Natural Language Qu Kit (NLQK), a Quantum NLP (QNLP) library - GitHub repo, PyPi project, website together with the Quantum AI Lab team.
The weekly AI & NLP Lab meetings continue during Summer 2025: Details about meeting times and location can be found on the website. (This is not an open course, student, study, or reading group, this is just my lab meeting!)
The weekly Quantum AI Lab meetings continue during Summer 2025: Details about meeting times and location can be found on the website. (see IU news article about that)
QED-C Discussion and Panel on the Future of Quantum and AI (March 12th, 2025) (LinkedIn post) with Cierra Choucair, Alain Chancé, Damir Cavar, Bob Coecke, Taha Selim (the recording is available on the QED-C YouTube channel)

Upcoming

Talk in the Computer Science Colloquium at the Luddy School at Indiana University Bloomington: “Complex-valued AI Models: Evaluating the effect of phase information in transformer architectures using Complex Bidirectional Integration for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD).” November 5/6, 2026, Luddy Hall, Bloomington.
Invited to be part of the speaker lineup for the 6th Annual Healthcare AI Conference: Operationalizing Intelligence, hosted by the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University Indianapolis. The conference brings together leaders from healthcare, research, technology, and industry to explore how artificial intelligence is moving from theory to real-world implementation in healthcare.
Complex Bidirectional Integration for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD), a hybrid classical-quantum AI model trained on classical computers for inferencing on quantum computers, talk at the Physics Colloquium at Indiana University Bloomington, 4-5 PM, Swain Hall, 2nd of December, 2026.
Quantum AI Conference 2026 (still old website, it will be updated soon) will be August 14th - 16th on the IUI campus in Indianapolis! Stay tuned for updates!
Cavar, D., P. Sullivan, S. Sparks, S. Miller, R. Jha, A. Jeje, Y. Charoenpornsawat (2026) Training Language Models and Embeddings for Hybrid Classical/Quantum Computing. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Cavar, D., N. Shah (2026) LLM OntologyRAG - Extending a Food-Agent with a Description Logic Knowledge Representation. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Cavar, D., S. Nagappan, K. Telaprolu, A. Stafford, M. Parker, D. Valdez (2026) Detecting Emerging Drug Slang and Code Language in Social Media Posts. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Abdo, M., D. Cavar (2026) Ontology-Grounded Knowledge Graph Construction for Alzheimer’s Research. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Cavar, D., S. Sparks, S. DeHaan, R. Jha, A. Jeje, Y. Charoenpomsawat, S. Miller (2026) Hybrid Classical-Quantum Language and World Models for AI - CBIRD, Poster presentation at the Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT) Meeting 2026 at Notre Dame, 1st of April, 2026.
“From Vectors to Qubits: Rethinking AI Models for the Hybrid Classical–Quantum Era,” invited keynote lecture, September 16-18, 2026 at the 37th Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (CECIIS 2026), Varaždin, Croatia.
“Hybrid Classical/Quantum Data Structures And Experiments For New AI Architectures,” invited lecture, March 25, 2026, Research Technologies Speaker Series, Cyberinfrastructure Building, Indiana University.
Talk on The Rise of Agentic AI and How It Will Change Our World (Damir Cavar, IU) at the Artificial Intelligence for Legal Professionals Conference, Center for International and Comparative Law, Indiana University, Robert H. McKinney School of Law.
Quantum Artificial Intelligence & Optimization 2025 workshop at the 17th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART).
Quantum AI and NLP Conference 2025 at Indiana University in August 2025.

Most Recent

Projects:

Quantum AI (see IU news article about that)
The Complex Bidirectional Inducer for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD) is a Language Model trained to be a fully hybrid classical/quantum model, which can be used on CPU/GPU and QPU systems without encoding loss, usable as a state-of-the-art text diffusion model, as a BERT-style bidirectional encoder-only model, etc. - the model is currently being trained.
Social Media data analysis for drug use and abuse, adverse reactions, in cooperation with Danny Valdez and Maria Parker from the IU School of Public Health
National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) Drugs A-Z Ontology, in cooperation with Danny Valdez and Maria Parker from the IU School of Public Health
Smart Recovery: Geospatial and AI Tools for Public Health Interventions - a cooperation with the Dove Recovery House and IU Center for Rural Engagement

Recent Publications:

Cavar, D., V. Aggarwal, J. Busemeyer, S. Yen-Chi Chen (2026) Quantum AI. Springer Nature, Communications in Computer and Information Science 2659.
Davis, A.S., B. Dickson, D. Cavar, D. Valdez, F.M. Tyers (2025) Advancing Adverse Drug Event Detection in Social Media Through Knowledge Graph and GraphRAG LLM Architectures. 2025 AAHB Annual Scientific Meeting, San Diego, CA. (Poster)
Damir Cavar, Koushik Reddy Parukola, Chi Zhang (2025) Word and Text Similarity Using Classical Word Embeddings in Quantum NLP Systems. Satellite Workshop: Quantum Machine Learning in Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Hyderabad, India.
Muhammad S. Abdo, Yash Hatekar and Damir Cavar (2025) AMWAL: Named Entity Recognition for Arabic Financial News. In proceedings of the FinNLP-FNP-LLMFinLegal 2025 workshop at COLING 2025. (download from ACL Anthology)
Chi Zhang, Akriti Kumari, Damir Cavar (2024) Entangled Meanings: Classification and Ambiguity Resolution in Near–Term QNLP. Paper and Poster presented at the IEEE Quantum Week 2024, Montreal, Canada, September 2024. (paper, poster)
Damir Cavar and Chi Zhang (2024) Semantic Similarities using Classical Embeddings in Quantum NLP. Paper and Poster presented at the IEEE Quantum Week 2024, Montreal, Canada, September 2024. (paper, poster)
Damir Cavar, Ludovic V. Mompelat, Muhammad S. Abdo (2024) The Typology of Ellipsis: A Corpus for Linguistic Analysis and Machine Learning Applications. Paper presented at the ACL Special Interest Group on Typology (SIGTYP) 2024, colocated with the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, St Julian’s, Malta. (full paper)
Günther Jikeli, Damir Cavar, Weejeong Jeong, Daniel Miehling, Pauravi Wagh, Denizhan Pak (2024) Auf dem Weg zu einer KI-Definition von Antisemitism. In: M. Hübscher and S. von Mehring (eds.) Antisemitismus in den Sozialen Medien. Verlag Barbara Budrich: Opladen, Berlin, Toronto, pp. 269-292.

Recent Presentations:

Cavar, D., Koushik Reddy Parukola, Shane Sparks (2025) Old Wine in New Bottles: Using Classical Word Embeddings in Quantum NLP Systems. Paper presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
A. Karkala Pai, D. Cavar (2025) A Voice-based Detection of Parkinson’s Disease: Feature Selection and Classification Results. Paper presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
Wang, R., R. Shrivastava, T. Sun, S. Lakshmi Anusha Chebolu, M. Kodandapani Naidu, T. Jayaprakash, J. Decatur, D. Cavar (2025) Improving LLM Reasoning Through Ontology-driven Knowledge Graphs: A Comparative Study of Generating Ontologies for Medical RAGs. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
Chi Zhang, Akriti Kumari, Damir Cavar (2024) Entangled Meanings: Classification and Ambiguity Resolution in Near–Term QNLP. Paper and Poster presented at the IEEE Quantum Week 2024, Montreal, Canada, September 2024. (paper, poster)
Damir Cavar and Chi Zhang (2024) Semantic Similarities using Classical Embeddings in Quantum NLP. Paper and Poster presented at the IEEE Quantum Week 2024, Montreal, Canada, September 2024. (paper, poster)
Quantum-Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) (2024) Presentation at the CQT - Center for Quantum Technologies, NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) Year 2, Phase I, Spring 2024 Industry Advisory Board Meeting, April 3-4, 2024, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN.
Quantum Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning (2024) AI & NLP Lab poster. Luddy-Crane Summit on March 29, 2024 at Indiana University Bloomington.
Damir Cavar. (2024) The Great NLP and AI Swindle: Why State-of-the-art AI Technologies Still Fail(?). Language Processing Brown Bag, Indiana University, February 5th, 2024. (slides)
Event Sequencing Annotation with TIE-ML at the The Eighteenth Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-18 2022), at LREC 2022 in Marseille, France.
Computational Semantics and Reasoning using Knowledge Graphs and Multi-modal Information Sources for Knowledge Extraction, presented at the Computational Linguistics Seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, October 6th, 2021.