SIGKDD Awards

Faisal Farooq, Ph.D., is an established leader with over 15 years of experience applying machine learning and managing large teams with a multimillion-dollar R&D portfolio. Dr. Farooq is the senior director of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Pinterest. Previously, he served as a director at Microsoft and was the founding head of the Health AI research group at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). Before relocating to Qatar, he led a team of over 100 members at IBM Watson, where he conducted cutting-edge research and delivered AI products to the healthcare market. Farooq has authored over 20 patents and 50 scientific publications and has organized more than 15 conferences and workshops, including NIPS, ICML, KDD, and ICPR. He was appointed as the general chair for KDD 2018 and associate general chair for KDD 2017.