SIGKDD and the KDD Conference
The road ahead
Usama Fayyad, Ph.D.
SIGKDD Chairman-elect - 2009
CEO, Open Insights
www.open-insights.com
www.open-insights.com
Open Insights
Overview
• A Word about a dear friend and KDD figure
• Words of Thanks
• Some directions for the future
• Discussion and Ideas
• Audience feedback
1
www.open-insights.com
Remembering Rajeev Motwani
(1962-2009)
Stanford Professor, great Algorithms and
Data Mining Researcher, Angel
Investor, Mentor to many
Entrepreneurs and Researchers, and
Personal Friend
• Graduated from U.C. Berkeley in
1988 with a Ph.D in Computer
Science.
• At Stanford Motwani served as a
professor and director of graduate
studies for the database
group/infolab, and Foundations
Group.
2
Rajeev passed away at age
47 on Friday June 10, 2009.
www.open-insights.com
Remembering Rajeev Motwani
(1962-2009)
Research Interests include:
Databases, data mining, information retrieval,
and web searching.
Privacy and security, particularly in the context
of databases and information retrieval.
Optimization and scheduling problems,
particularly for applications in computer
systems, compilers, and databases.
Computational and combinatorial geometry
with applications to robotics and vision.
Computational biology and automated drug design.
Design and analysis of algorithms with emphasis on approximations, online
computations, and randomized algorithms, as well as related complexity
theory.
3
www.open-insights.com
Remembering Rajeev Motwani
(1962-2009)
On a personal note
in 1996, I edited the original paper on Page
Rank by Brin, Page and Motwani.
Rajeev was the first investor in my first startup out of Microsoft: digiMine, Inc.
A dear friend, a great mentor, and one of the
most humble people I worked with
We will all miss him.
4
www.open-insights.com
Words of thanks
• From 1989 to 2009, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro has been actively
involved in the organization of KDD conferences and the SIGKDD
• I would like to thank him personally for his amazing service
record, and hope he continues to be actively involved in SIGKDD
• My thanks for the outgoing member of the SIGKDD EC
• Prof. Jiawei Han of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
5
www.open-insights.com
Elected Board
• Chair:
– Usama Fayyad, Open Insights, USA
• Secretary/Teasurer:
– Osmar Zaiane, University of alberta, Canada
• Board of Directors:
– Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University, USA
– Robert Grossman, National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at U. Illinois
Chicago and Open Data Group, LLC, USA
– David Jensen, Knowledge Discovery Laboratory at the U. of Massachusetts
Amherst, USA
– Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research, USA
– Sunita Sarawagi, KR School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay, India
– Ramakrishnan Srikant, Google Inc., USA
• Outgoing Chair:
– Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, KD Nuggets, USA
6
www.open-insights.com
KDD-2010
Location: Washington, D.C. (most likely)
Possibly New York in case we do not secure good venue
• Program Chairs
– Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo!
– Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• General Chair: Bharat Rao, Siemens
– Associate GC: Balaji Krishnapuram, Siemens
The functional area chairs so far are:
Karl Rexer (Sponsorhips)
Prem Melville (Publicity)
Brenden Kitts (Web)
Nitesh Chawla (Treasurer)
Murat Dundar (Student Awards)
Jennifer Dy (Exhibits Demos)
Jieping Ye (Proceedings)
Ramani Duraiswami (Local Arrangements)
7
www.open-insights.com
Ideas for the future of SIGKDD
• General more aggressive PR efforts:
– Working on restoring the good name of KDD
• countering/avoiding some of the data mining bad rep
• Award for Service to Society?
– Press coverage on KDD Cup
– More recognition of Award Winners in press and academic media
– More promotion of best papers awards
• Taking KDD Cup to the next level
– A prize organization with professionally run competition
– Long-running competitions over multiple years
• Benchmark databases with benchmark tasks and problems
• Working on creating more vibrant exhibits
– SC model
– DMA model
8
www.open-insights.com
Ideas for the future of SIGKDD
• Deployed Apps and Systems
– More stringent definition of DEPLOYED
– More recognition and publicity for DEPLOYED applications
– More academic and press coverage of published work
– Deployed Apps Awards
• Industry Speakers Awards and Recognition
– A more active Industry/Applications track
• Test of Time Award for SIGKDD
– Most influential papers over 10 years+
• Challenge Area of the Year “theme” for SIGKDD
– Special area where deep concept papers, ideas, challenges are encouraged
• Survey tutorials and video lectures/podcasts to help newcomers catch
up with various areas
– More systematic coverage of basic areas in Tutorials
9
www.open-insights.com
Ideas for the future of SIGKDD
• More active Panels/Discissions
• STUDENT Memberships
– Add free student registration awards
– Special registration discounts for members and student members
• Member Benefits of SIGKDD
– Take SIGKDD Explorations to the next level
– Magazine with advertising and more active articles
10
www.open-insights.com
www.open-insights.com
Discussion and Feedback
from Audience
Usama_Fayyad@yahoo.com
Open Insights
11