News

Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation,
has selected Digimine's president and CEO Usama Fayyad, Ph.D., as a
representative of the field of data mining for the Technology Review
Ten, or "TR10".

The TR10 is a list of 10 emerging technology fields -- each
represented by one individual -- that will have a profound impact on
the economy and how we live and work, as determined by the editors of
Technology Review. Technology Review's editors chose Dr. Fayyad based
on his experience as a data mining innovator who exemplifies the
potential and promise of the field. Technology Review profiles
Dr. Fayyad's career as a data mining pioneer and describes his newest
role as CEO of digiMine in the January/February 2001 issue.

(Other The Technology Review Fields are:
 Brain-Machine Interface, Flexible Transistors, Digital Rights Management,
 Biometrics, Natural Language Processing, Microphotonics, Untangling Code,
Robot Design, and Microfluidics.  GPS)

The future of data-mining technology, says Fayyad, is wide open,
especially as researchers begin to move beyond the field's original
focus on highly structured, relational databases. One very hot area is
"text data mining": extracting unexpected relationships from huge
collections of free-form text documents. The results are still
preliminary, as various labs experiment with natural-language
processing, statistical word counts and other techniques. But the
University of California at Berkeley's LINDI system, to take one
example, has already been used to help geneticists search the
biomedical literature and produce plausible hypotheses for the
function of newly discovered genes.

Another hot area, says Fayyad, is "video mining": using a combination
of speech recognition, image understanding and natural-language
processing techniques to open up the world's vast video archives to
efficient computer searching. For instance, when Carnegie Mellon
University's Informedia II system is given an archive of, say, CNN
news clips, it produces a computer-searchable index by automatically
dividing each clip into individual scenes accompanied by transcripts
and headlines.

Fayyad hopes that ultimately the techniques of data mining will become
so successful and so thoroughly integrated into standard database
systems that they will no longer be thought of as exotic. "People will
just assume that their database software will do what they need."

See the full article at
www.technologyreview.com/magazine/jan01/TR10_fayyad.asp