ACM SIGKDD 2010 Service Award to Prof. Osmar R. Zaiane

Osmar Zaiane

ACM SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD). It is conferred on one individual or one group for their outstanding professional services and contributions to the field of knowledge discovery and data mining.

Prof. Zaiane is currently the Secretary-Treasurer of ACM SIGKDD. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of SIGKDD Explorations, the flagship newsletter of SIGKDD, since 2007 after serving as its Associate Editor from 2004 to 2007.

Prof. Zaiane has a long history of serving the KDD community. In addition to his dedicated service to SIGKDD and its flagship conferences and workshops, he has served the wider KDD community in a wide variety of roles and responsibilities at ICDM, SDM, PAKDD, SIGMOD/PODS, ECML/PKDD, WebKDD, MDM, etc. He has served as technical program co-chair, conference vice-chair, tutorials chair, technical program committee member, exhibits and demos chair, sponsorship chair, proceedings chair, registration chair, publicity chair, webmaster, and other volunteer positions. He currently serves on the steering committee of IEEE ICDM.

He also actively promotes data mining in many international communities through active participation. In China for the past several years, he organized and chaired the International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA). He currently serves on ADMA's steering committee. He was Honorary General Chair of EGC, the French data mining conference. He was conferred the 2009 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award.

Prof. Zaiane is currently the McCalla and Killam Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta , Canada as well as the Scientific Director of the Alberta Ingenuity Center for Machine Learning, a world renowned centre conducting fundamental and applied research in machine learning.

Prof. Zaiane received his PhD in 1999 from Simon Fraser University , Canada. He joined the University of Alberta , Canada in 1999 and is now a full Professor at its Department of Computing Science. He is one of the leading researchers in data mining, machine learning, and database fields and contributed over one hundred publications. He is on the editorial board of many journals. After working for many years on canonical tasks such as outlier detection, clustering, associative classification, community mining in information networks, etc., he is lately focusing on applications in healthcare and finance.

The previous SIGKDD Service Award winners were Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ramasamy Uthurusamy, Usama M. Fayyad, Xindong Wu, the Weka team led by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank, Won Kim, Robert Grossman, and Sunita Sarawagi.

The award includes a plaque and a check for $2,500 and will be presented at the Opening Plenary Session of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, on July 25, 2010 in Washington , DC .

ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Prof. Osmar R. Zaiane its 2010 Service Award for his significant service and contributions to the global KDD community.

2010 ACM SIGKDD Awards Committee

• Ramasamy Uthurusamy, Chair
• Robert Grossman ( University of Illinois at Chicago )
• Jiawei Han ( University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Tom Mitchell ( Carnegie Mellon University )
• Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (KDnuggets)
• Raghu Ramakrishnan (Yahoo! Research)
• Sunita Sarawagi (Indian Institute of Technology , Bombay )
• Padhraic Smyth ( University of California at Irvine )
• Ramakrishnan Srikant (Google Research)
• Xindong Wu ( University of Vermont )
• Mohammed J. Zaki (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

ACM SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD). It is conferred on one individual or one group for their outstanding professional services and contributions to the KDD field. Services recognized include significant contributions to the activities of professional KDD societies and conferences, leading organizations or projects that contribute technically to the field as a whole, furthering education of students, researchers and practitioners of KDD, funding R&D activities of the KDD community, professional volunteer services in disseminating technical information to the field, and contributions to society at large through applications of KDD concepts to improve global medical care, education, disaster/crisis management, environment, etc. The award includes a plaque and a check for $2,500 and will be presented at the Opening Plenary Session of the annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on KDD.

About ACM SIGKDD
ACM SIGKDD, ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), is the premier global professional organization for researchers and professionals dedicated to the advancement of the science and practice of knowledge discovery and data mining. It established the Innovation and Service Awards to recognize outstanding technical and service contributions to the KDD field.

About ACM
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.