Features

The next several years are pivotal ones for knowledge discovery and data mining. Major infusions of government support are fueling important new research projects, corporations are fielding major new systems with non-trivial KDD components, and government agencies are engaged in new efforts to modernize and interconnect their information systems. At the same time, long-awaited synergies are beginning to emerge between technologies in AI, statistics, databases, visualization, information retrieval and extraction, knowledge representation, and reasoning. Members of our field will be called upon to produce innovative and reliable technologies and to help the public and government officials understand their potential impacts. SIGKDD must continue to take an active role in promoting high scientific standards, providing solid technical information to decisionmakers, and continuing to weave together the many intellectual threads that inform work in knowledge discovery and data mining.

Biography
David Jensen is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 1991 to 1995, he served as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. He received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992. His research focuses on machine learning and knowledge discovery in complex data sets, with applications to social network analysis, web mining, and fraud detection.

His most recent work focuses on discovery of causal knowledge in massive data sets through the automated identification and application of quasi- experimental designs. He serves on the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining and on the program committees of the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data. He was a member of the 2006-2007 Defense Science Study Group, and he currently serves on DARPA's Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Group.