Yahoo Inc. said Friday Usama Fayyad, its chief data officer and executive vice president, received the 2007 Innovation Award by the Association of Computing Machinery.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) said the honor is the highest technical award in the fields of data mining and knowledge discovery, and recognizes individuals who have either driven significant innovations or who have significantly influenced the direction of research and development in these areas.
The association said 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.”
Before joining Yahoo, Fayyad led two startups focused on data mining, business intelligence and targeting algorithms.
Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal / PDF