Briefs

May 15, 2006. Rakesh Agrawal, who is credited with creating data mining, or the science of extracting trends from large and often disparate databases, has left IBM to become a Microsoft technical fellow in the company's Search Labs.

Large tech companies for years have tried to woo each other's top scientists, and in the search and computer science field, Google has lately been getting most of them. Google pulled away Microsoft's Kai-Fu Lee to run its China labs, which led to a lawsuit. Google also snagged search expert Udi Manber from Amazon.com.

Agrawal--who had been an IBM fellow, the company's highest title for researchers--is one of the better-known scientists in data extraction and databases. Data mining is a hot topic because it has emerged that the federal government has begun to use the method to examine millions of phone records. Corporations, though, have exploited it for years as a way to understand customer behavior and enhance their own Web traffic.

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