Data Mining Consulting Experience Professional Activities & Conferences Presentations & Tutorials Recent Publications Recent Interviews Contact Information

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ph.D. is the President of KDnuggets, which provides research and consulting services in the areas of data mining, knowledge discovery, bioinformatics, and business analytics. Previously, he led data mining and consulting groups at GTE Laboratories, Knowledge Stream Partners, and Xchange. He has extensive experience developing CRM, customer attrition, cross-sell, segmentation and other models for some of the leading banks, insurance companies, and telcos. He also worked on clinical trial, microarray, and proteomic data analysis for several leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Gregory served as an expert witness and provided expert opinions in several cases.

Gregory is also the Editor and Publisher of KDnuggets News, the leading newsletter on data mining and knowledge discovery, and the associated KDnuggets.com website, a top-ranked portal for data mining and knowledge discovery software, jobs, solutions, courses, companies, and publications, and more.

Gregory is currently the Chair of ACM SIGKDD, the leading professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is also the founder of Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) conferences. He organized and chaired the first three Knowledge Discovery in Databases workshops in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and then chaired the KDD Steering Committee until the creation of ACM SIGKDD in 1998.

Gregory has over 60 publications, including 2 best-selling books and several edited collections on topics related to data mining and knowledge discovery, including SIGKDD Explorations Special Issue on Microarray Data Mining (Vol 5, Issue 2, Dec 2003).

Gregory received ACM SIGKDD Service Award (2000) and IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award for contributions to data mining field and community.

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Current Affiliations

Gregory serves on the scientific advisory board of KXEN, global analytic software company that provides advanced analytics to be embedded in existing enterprise applications and business processes.

Experience

• Developed methods for identifying suspected on-line auction fraud
• Analyzed web usage logs for a large web publisher to improve visitor conversion
• Analyzed memory drug effectiveness and relationship between pharmakinetics and pharmadynamics
• Analyzed proteomic datasets for biomarkers of a neurological disease; found a number of novel diagnostics.
• Developed link analysis and customer grouping algorithm for a telephone company.
• Was an invited expert in Shell workshop on technology impact in 2025.
• Analyzed drug effectiveness in clinical trials for a large pharmaceutical company.
• Analyzed DNA microarrays and found a new gene marker for a type of brain tumor.
• Worked with a state agency to develop predictive models for child support non-payment and attrition.
• Consulted on several technology-related lawsuits and served as an expert witness in patent-related and trade-secret related lawsuits.

2003 to 2004, Research Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Participated in research on microarrays data analysis; prepared and submitted NIH and NSF grant applications related to microarray data analysis.

Spring 2004, Visiting Professor, Computer Science, Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, South Korea. Taught classes on data mining and bioinformatics.

Fall 2003, Visiting Professor, Computer Science, Connecticut College, New London, CT. Developed and taught a course in Machine Learning and Data Mining. Developed modules for courses in Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Introduction to Programming and Computer Science.

4/2000 to 5/2001, Vice-President and Chief Scientist, Xchange, Boston, MA, an analytical CRM and campaign management company. Gregory led the development of Adaptive Learning Engine to support multi-channel, complex customer interaction in real-time. Prior to that, Gregory led Xchange analytics consulting group and participated in a number of consulting engagements on the topics of CRM, data mining, customer attrition, cross-sell, and finding profitable uses for customer data.

3/1997 to 3/2000, Director and later Vice-President and Chief Scientist at Knowledge Stream Partners (KSP), Boston, MA, a consulting and software development company which specialized in advanced data mining and customer analytics. KSP was purchased by Xchange in April 2000.
Gregory led a consulting team that worked with some of the leading banks, brokerages, telcos, insurance companies, and e-tailers. The engagements included

• Retail customer segmentation for a major European bank
• Analysis of design and business focus for a Japanese pharmaceutical company
• Attrition models for credit products for a major US bank
• Mortgage default models for a major Latin American bank
• Analysis of reserve needs for a major car lease financing company
• Analysis of interest rate sensitivity for a major insurance company
• Developing value-attrition and optimized cross-sell models for a global financial institution
• Analyzing e-tail operations and identifying cross-sell opportunities and shopping cart abandonment

Gregory also led the development of component-based Knowledge Discovery Engine consulting tools, and KSP consulting methodology.

1985 to 1997, Senior and later Principal Member of Technical Staff at GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA, world-wide research lab for GTE, major telephone company (now part of Verizon). Gregory started and led the first Knowledge Discovery in Databases project in the world (1989-1997). The project focused on developing and deploying advanced data mining and knowledge discovery systems for business applications. Developed CHAMP system (1996-97) for Churn Analysis, Modeling and Prediction of behavior of cellular phone customers. CHAMP had a 3-level architecture, with a data engine integrated with GTE Wireless data warehouse, discovery engine combining decision trees, neural networks, and other modeling approaches, and a browser-based front-end based. CHAMP was applied to all of GTE's 4 million cellular customers and was nominated for GTE's highest technical achievement award.

Prior to CHAMP, Gregory led the development of KEFIR (Key Findings Reporter), described in Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, a system for analysis and summarization of key changes in large databases. KEFIR automatically analyzed changes in all relevant variables, selected the important ones, and added, where possible, expert recommendations on what to do about the changes. KEFIR prototype was applied to GTE health care database and has received Leslie H. Warner award, GTE's highest award for technical achievement. Before KEFIR, Gregory worked on developing intelligent front-ends to heterogeneous databases and natural language front-ends.

1981 to 1985, Senior Analyst at Strategic Information Systems, Burlington, MA. Designed, developed and implemented financial database query and reporting systems. Developed innovative query optimization methods and self-organizing database indices.

Education

Professional Societies, Conferences

Gregory played a key role in creation of ACM SIGKDD, the leading professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He was elected in 2001 as a director of SIGKDD, and in 2005 as the Chair of SIGKDD. In August of 2000, he received the first SIGKDD Service Award for his contributions to the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery community.

Gregory is also serving on the Steering Committee of ICDM, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, a leading international forum for data mining research. In 2007 Gregory received IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award for contributions to data mining.

He also was on program committees of numerous other conferences and workshops on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Databases and was a Senior Program Committee member of AAAI-99 (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) and AAAI-2000.

Gregory actively promotes standards in the data mining field and participated in 2 industry standard-setting activities:

• CRISP -- Cross-Industry Standard Process Model, which developed industry- and tool-neutral Data Mining process model.
• PMML - Predictive Modeling Markup Language, XML-based, vendor independent language for describing data mining models.

Publications

Gregory edited or co-edited many collections on data mining and knowledge discovery, including two best-selling books: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (AAAI/MIT Press, 1991) and Advances in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (AAAI/MIT Press, 1996), and has over 60 publications in the areas of data mining, artificial intelligence and database research.

Gregory presented many talks and tutorials on data mining related topics.

He was a founding co-editor in chief of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, and is currently on the editorial board of the journal. Gregory is also an Associate Editor of TKDD, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD).

Gregory served on the editorial board of Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Kluwer, 1993-2008.

Recent Interviews

An interview at KDD-07 Conference in San Jose, CA Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro on KDD-07 and data mining (4.5 min)

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Tom H. C. Anderson talk about Data Mining, Text Mining, Web 2.0, and Market Research (Mar 2008)

Datamining blog interview with Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (Apr 2008)

Interview in Computerra magazine, in Russian, 2007.
Also here: Великие раскопки и великие вызовы (Velikie Raskopki i Velikie Vuzovi), Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro interview in Computerra, in Russian, (PDF).