IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award

The IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award is given to one individual or one group who has made influential contributions to the field of data mining. The 2011 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award goes to Professor Geoff McLachlan of the University of Queensland, Australia.

Geoff McLachlan has made many contributions over the years to the fields of classification, statistical learning, and pattern recognition that have had a major impact in data mining. These contributions are best illustrated in his Wiley monographs, Discriminant Analysis and Statistical Pattern Recognition, The EM Algorithm and Extensions (with Thriyambakam Krishnan), and Finite Mixture Models (with David Peel). He has written six books (the last five in the Wiley Series in Statistics and Probability) and over 200 papers in which the bulk of the results are on topics among the most important in data mining research and development.

Starting with his initial papers in the mid-seventies, Geoff McLachlan has pioneered the use of finite mixture models fitted via the EM algorithm to provide a model-based approach to clustering. With the ever-increasing need to be able to handle high-dimensional data sets, he has focused more recently on the use of mixtures with factor components. In the case of supervised classification, he has written extensively on the estimation of error rates of classifiers, addressing, for example, the problem of how to estimate the error rates of classifiers formed from high-dimensional data (for example, in bioinformatics) without incurring a selection bias of practical significance.

Professor McLachlan's contributions have received numerous citations and he is a Thomson Reuters ISI Highly Cited Author in the category of Mathematics, which includes his papers in Statistics, Machine Learning, and Pattern Recognition, and hence Data Mining. His articles have received also thousands of citations in Google Scholar. In 2010, he was awarded the Pitman Medal of the Statistical Society of Australia in recognition of his "outstanding achievement in, and contribution to, the discipline of Statistics."

Professor McLachlan is Director of the Centre for Statistics at the University of Queensland. He was awarded an Australian Professorial Fellowship by the Australian Research Council (ARC) to undertake research for 2007-2011. In 2008, he was appointed to the College of Experts of the Australian Research Council for three years (2008-2010) and is currently president of the IFCS (International Federation of Classification Societies). He has served on the boards of several journals associated with data mining and has been a member of the program or organizational committees for various conferences in data mining.

2011 IEEE ICDM Nomination and Evaluation Committees

• Benjamin W. Wah (Co-Chair), Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
• Xindong Wu (Co-Chair), University of Vermont, USA
• Anil Jain, Michigan State University, USA
• Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota, USA
• Ramamohanarao Kotagiri, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Heikki Mannila, University of Helsinki, Finland
• Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, KDnuggets, USA
• Shusaku Tsumoto, Shimane University, Japan
• Osmar R. Zaiane, University of Alberta, Canada