ACM SIGKDD 2007 Innovation Award Winner, Dr. Usama Fayyad, to Give Innovation Award Lecture and Keynote at KDD 2007 Conference
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced that Dr. Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions, has been awarded the 2007 Innovation Award by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM’s SIGKDD Innovation Award is the highest technical award in the fields of data mining and knowledge discovery. This award recognizes individuals who have either driven significant innovations that have transferred to industry practice in impactful ways or who have significantly influenced the direction of research and development in these areas.
“Dr. Fayyad made major contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including machine learning and data mining algorithms that scale to large commercial database systems and the development of fundamental applications in mining massive science data sets that have lead to significant new scientific discoveries.”
“ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Usama Fayyad with its 2007 Innovation Award,” said Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, chair of ACM SIGKDD. “Dr. Fayyad made major contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including machine learning and data mining algorithms that scale to large commercial database systems and the development of fundamental applications in mining massive science data sets that have lead to significant new scientific discoveries.”
Fayyad’s contributions span fundamental technical innovation and significant large-scale applications of science data analysis, commercial practice and commercial database systems. From his early work on applications of data mining and statistical pattern recognition to massive scientific data sets in Astronomy and Planetary Geology to co-authoring new SQL Extensions and leading development work for embedding data mining algorithms inside of Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 system, Fayyad has led significant scientific advances and new discoveries in these fields. Before joining Yahoo!, Fayyad led two successful startups focused on data mining, business intelligence and targeting algorithms. At Yahoo!, Fayyad is responsible for the company’s overall data strategy as well as overseeing the Yahoo! Research organization.
“This award highlights the importance of technical innovation in real applications and in building analysis systems at a massive scale and I’m honored to be recognized by my peers, leaders of the community and the field as a whole,” said Fayyad. “At Yahoo!, advancements in data mining and knowledge discovery are making it possible for us to better understand how our customers use our products and what the future of the Internet experience will be. We are focused on creating advanced data insights technology that will enable Yahoo! to build next-generation web applications by learning about the dynamics and growth of online communities and the technologies for information navigation of the future.”
The award will be presented at the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining on August 12, 2007 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif. Fayyad will also present the following plenary addresses:
ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award Talk
Sunday, August 12, 2007
6:45 pm – 7:30 p.m.
Invited Talk – From Mining the Web to Inventing the New Sciences Underlying the Internet
Monday, August 13, 2007
9:00 am – 10:00 a.m.
Yahoo! Research is focused on developing the science that will underlie the next generation of technologies and businesses helping to shape the future of the Web. Yahoo! Research continues to be integrated closely with business units and product teams throughout the company, enabling the scientific approach and expertise of the organization to directly benefit Yahoo!’s consumers and advertisers. For example, Yahoo! has incorporated algorithmic research into the company’s advanced platforms for social media and search, which allow users to find and share the information that they want, when they want. The company has also leveraged research on marketplace design and pricing mechanisms for sponsored search.
To register to attend the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, please visit:http://www.kdd2007.com/registration.html.
About Dr. Usama Fayyad
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting company. In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine Inc. (now Revenue Science, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and analytics for some of the world’s largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services.
Fayyad’s professional experience also includes five years spent leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and building the data mining products for Microsoft’s server division. From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where his work in the analysis and exploration of scientific databases gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.
Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), and also holds BSE’s in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He was founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Newsletter: SIGKDD Explorations from 1997 to 2002. He has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, and databases. He is a prolific inventor with over 30 patents issued and over 50 filed patents in the areas of data mining, on-line marketing and the Internet.
About ACM SIGKDD
ACM SIGKDD (www.kdd.org) – ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining – is the premier professional organization dedicated to advancement of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining research and applications.
About Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo!’s mission is to connect people to their passions, their communities and world’s knowledge. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Source: Business Wire / PDF