SIGKDD Welcomes New Chair, Treasurer and Members to Its Executive Committee
The ACM SIGKDD election results were recently concluded. The new SIGKDD leadership team took office on July 1, 2013. The newly elected chair of SIGKDD is Prof. Bing Liu, professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. Prof. Liu is a well respected data mining and machine learning researcher and SIGKDD community is honored to have him serve as chair.
The new treasurer will be Dr. Michael Zeller, CEO of Zementis. Dr. Zeller has been instrumental in serving the KDD community in various roles, most recently as the Industrial and Government Track co-chair for KDD-2012.
“The rise of Big Data is driving a tremendous interest in data mining research as well as real-world applications across industry and government. SIGKDD community has a unique opportunity to lead the direction by providing a global forum to disseminate cutting edge research results and to demonstrate innovative applications” states Prof. Liu.
“Our vision is to foster a strong partnership between academia, research institutions, and industry organizations. A strong community will contribute to the continued success of data science and advanced predictive analytics to meet the challenges of this data-driven world. Our hope is that not only will this partnership accelerate transition research results into business applications, it will also inspire a new generation of students and guide universities to develop critical talent for Big Data applications,” adds Dr. Zeller.
During the recently concluded election, SIGKDD members also elected the SIGKDD executive committee (EC):
- Deepak Agarwal, LinkedIn;
- Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University;
- Ying Li, Concurix;
- Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University;
- Raghu Ramakrishnan, Microsoft;
- Mohammed J. Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Qatar Computing Research Institute.
The SIGKDD community would like to express its sincere gratitude to Dr. Usama Fayyad, who led the executive committee during these past years, and was instrumental in making SIGKDD the premier community for both academic and industry data mining professionals. He will continue to provide his leadership and guidance as a member of the SIGKDD executive committee.
The community would also like to thank Prof. Osmar Zaiane, the past treasurer, for his efforts in managing the finances of the organization and for his leadership role in SIGKDD operations.
SIGKDD is grateful for the volunteer contributions of past SIGKDD EC officers whose term recently ended (2009 – 2013): Prof. Robert Grossman, Prof. David Jensen, Dr. Gregory Piatetsky, KDnuggets (past Chair), Prof. Sunita Sarawagi, and Dr. Ramakrishnan Srikant. Their guidance and leadership has resulted in establishing SIGKDD and its annual KDD conference as the flagship venue for data mining and machine learning research.
Being a volunteer run organization, SIGKDD relies heavily on member contributions. These roles are significantly challenging and strategic to the directions of advancing knowledge discovery, data mining and machine learning research and practice. The experiences and diversity that these new officers bring to the team showcases the many dimensions in which SIGKDD continues to grow and evolve as an organization. We wish the new team all the very best to further the mission of innovation at SIGKDD.
Meet the new SIGKDD EC at the upcoming KDD 2013 conference, August 11-14, 2013, in Chicago. We hope to see you there!
