Features

My plan is to ensure that SIGKDD prospers as a viable technical community attracting serious researchers and practitioners in the area. I intend to uphold the technical excellence of the community by ensuring that technically sound and enthusiastic members are selected for crucial positions like conference organization and journal and newsletter editorship. I plan to ensure that the conference reviewing process is continuously monitored for fairness and quality. I plan to ensure the continued presence of industry in the KDD conference through a strong industrial track and a viable exhibits program.

Since my research straddles the three related fields of mining, machine learning, and databases, I am uniquely poised to enhance cross-fertilization across these communities. I have been associated with SIGKDD for over ten years now in various capacities including SIGKDD editor, member of the board of directors, and program co-chair of the SIGKDD conference. I am also actively involved in premier database conferences like SIGMOD and VLDB for over fourteen years now and am currently a member of the VLDB endowment board. I have occupied senior committee positions in premier learning and AI conferences like ICML and IJCAI. The field of KDD is inherently cross-disciplinary and has a long tradition of engaging researchers from these communities. Therefore, it is important that key office bearers relate to these sister fields.

Biography
Sunita Sarawagi researches in the fields of databases, data mining, and machine learning. Her current research interests are information integration, graphical and structured models, and probabilistic databases. She is associate professor at IIT Bombay. Prior to that she was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center. She got her PhD in databases from the University of California at Berkeley and a bachelors degree from IIT Kharagpur. She has several publications in databases and data mining and several patents. She serves on the board of directors of ACM SIGKDD and VLDB foundation. She has served as program chair for the ACM SIGKDD 2008 conference and as program committee member for SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD, ICDE, and ICML conferences. She is on the editorial board of the ACM TODS, ACM TKDD, and FnT for machine learning journals.