News

KDD-2000, held in Boston August 20-23, was a great conference, attended by over 900 people (KDD record) from 34 countries. The recognition given to the importance of Data Mining is evidenced by the heavyweights who were there, such as Mike Saylor (CEO of Microstrategy) and James Goodnight (CEO of SAS). Both CEOs gave keynote talks where they outlined their vision for their companies -- and sparks were flying when Goodnight was commenting on MSTR losses last quarter.

KDD-Cup was a very interesting competition -- see next item in this issue for a separate report.

The conference featured 6 excellent tutorials and several standing-room only workshops, followed by research and industrial track papers, as well as exhibits from 20+ leading companies.

The research papers focused on association rules, visualization, interactive knowledge exploration, mining the web, and other topics while the industrial track highlighted applications in aerospace, e-commerce, marketing, manufacturing, medicine, stock market, and telephony.

The proceedings of KDD-2000 are available from ACM -- see www.acm.org

Panel on Privacy, Personalization, and Standards produced interesting debates.

Rakesh Agrawal from IBM has received the first ACM SIGKDD Award for Innovation for his many research contributions, including his pioneering work on association rules, mining sequences and much, much more.

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (yours truly) has received the first ACM SIGKDD Service award for starting the KDD conferences and contributions to the KDD community, including maintenance of KDnuggets newsletter.

The next year's KDD Conference will be held in Silicon Valley, and will probably be even better -- see you there!