Blaž Zupan is a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at the University of Ljubljana and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He leads the Bioinformatics Laboratory, where his group develops methods and tools for machine learning, data visualization, and computational biology.
Together with Janez Demšar, he leads the development of Orange, an open-source platform for visual programming and interactive data exploration. His group’s work in computational biology includes GenePath, an early AI system for inferring genetic networks from experiments, and dictyExpress, an interactive platform for exploring gene expression data. These projects share a common goal: making sophisticated computational methods accessible, interpretable, and useful for scientific discovery.
His research spans explainable AI, data integration, gene network inference, and visual analytics. More recently, his group has been developing AI agents for scientific discovery, combining language models with experimental data, scientific literature, computational tools, and interactive visualizations. The goal is to create research assistants that not only provide answers but also let scientists explore the evidence, examine intermediate results, and challenge the conclusions.