SIGKDD News

We are weeks away from the 18th International ACM SIGKDD Conference, KDD 2012! As we approach early bird registration for the conference, I wanted to take a minute and share with you the importance of the event and encourage you to take advantage of the upcoming early bird registration.

For the first time in its history, this flagship knowledge discovery and data mining conference will be held in Asia. As before, the KDD 2012 conference will be a central place where researchers, practitioners and students from academia, business, government and industry converge to exchange the newest and most exciting ideas and results in the KDD area. Unlike previous KDD conferences, however, many new faces will be seen, new voices heard, and new perspectives discussed. This is particularly true because this KDD will be held in Beijing, the heartbeat of China's universities, research institutes, industrial and governmental offices; the centre of the rapidly rising and opening China.

In this year's KDD conference, we have been able to attract some of our most prominent data scientists, including:

• Yong Shi, Executive Deputy Director, Research Center on Fictitious Economy and Data Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences/Strategic Advisor, China Data Technology (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. As part of the Industry Practice Expo Track, Dr. Shi will provide an overview of China’s National Personal Credit Scoring System, known as “China Score”, a unique advanced KDD application with direct strategic impact on Chinese economic policy.
• Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, the leading search engine in China and the third largest independent search engine in the world, will join us as KDD 2012 keynote speaker. 
• Taking the advantage of the fact that KDD 2012 will be held in the Asia-Pacific region, the conference will feature a first of its kind of Asia-Pacific Track, giving a forum to the growing number of scientists from the region to share their contributions to KDD and increase awareness and momentum of KDD research in this region. 

This year, we have an exciting KDDCUP competition on the topics of social media and online advertising. The host of KDDCUP 2012 is Tencent Inc., an Internet Giant in China. This would be the first KDDCUP competition using one of the largest social networking and microblogging data, which can serve the data mining research community for years to come.

Over the years, we have seen a dramatic increase of interest in KDD from China, both in research and practice. Social networks, microblogging (Weibo) and online commerce have been flourishing, with user populations at hundreds of millions strong and rapidly expanding. A recent KDD related workshop held on a weekend in Beijing easily attracted more than 500 students and researchers with almost no advance notice, thanks to the rise of social media. To help build a bridge between the east with the west, we have organized an online interview of top KDD experts in China, which is published on a Special Issue of KDD Explorations.

In addition, to help recruit new blood into the KDD field, we have organized a special feature for KDD 2012, which is a new KDD 2012 Summer School held on Aug 10 and 11 2012 just before the main KDD conference. The theme of the summer school is `Mining Complex Data' and `Large Scale Data Mining'. The summer school is particularly designed for students to get a systematic coverage on contemporary topics from top experts in the world.

We are sure that KDD 2012 will only accelerate the achievements of data scientists in the region and across the world and look forward to welcoming you in Beijing!

欢迎! (Welcome!)
Qiang Yang
General Chair of ACM KDD 2012
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China