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SIGKDD has been an extremely effective, well-run organization, and has helped the KDD community to grow rapidly and establish its identity at the intersection of database systems, machine learning, numerical methods, and statistics. This is the primary task of SIGKDD, and I will do my best to help the SIGKDD Chair in this ongoing effort. As we go forward, we have significant opportunities ahead of us. Clearly, the flood of data shows no signs of abating, and data mining is a critical component of any rational approach to making sense of this information. On the other hand, increasing use of this technology has, understandably, heightened awareness of potential privacy and security violations.

We, as technology professionals, have the responsibility to explain the value of the tools we develop, and equally, to ensure that they are not abused. SIGKDD has taken a leadership role in advocating the importance of data mining, and must continue to be actively engaged in framing public opinion and policy. If elected, I will try to help with this process. I will also try to bridge the SIGMOD and SIGKDD communities, and foster closer interactions.

Biography
Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, and is a Research Fellow, heading the Web Information Management group in Yahoo! Research. His work in database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization, and web-scale data management, has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems and the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (with Johannes Gehrke). Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Ramakrishnan is Chair of ACM SIGMOD, on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD and the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, and has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, associate editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and the Database area editor of the Journal of Logic Programming. Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is on leave as Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.