Bing Liu elected as new chair of ACM SIGKDD Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Organization

By Gregory Piatetsky, Jul 2, 2013.

ACM SIGKDD is a leading research association for advancement of science of knowledge discovery and data mining. The main activity of SIGKDD is organizing KDD - the annual conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, with next conference - KDD-2013 in Chicago, Aug 11-14.

The 2013 SIGKDD elections have produced an excellent team who will lead KDD for the next 4 years, starting July 1, 2013:

Bing Liu, Chair.
Bing Liu is a professor at U. Illinois Chicago and a leading researcher in the areas of Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Data and Web Mining, and Machine Learning. He is an author of many research papers. His most recent books are:

• Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents and Usage Data, 2nd Edition, July 2011, Springer
• Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, Morgan & Claypool, May 2012, 167 pages.

Michael Zeller, Treasurer.

Michael is a CEO and co-founder of Zementis, a software company focused on predictive analytics and advanced decisioning in the cloud. Zementis Universal PMML Plug-in enables highly scalable, massively parallel scoring in-database and on Hadoop.
Michael is also one of the leaders of PMML effort.

Two of the 2009-2013 directors have run for election and were re-elected:

• Johannes Gehrke, Cornell University
• Raghu Ramakrishnan, Technical Fellow, CTO Information Services at Microsoft

They are joined by 4 newly elected directors:

• Deepak Agarwal, LinkedIn
• Ying Li, Concurix
• Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University
• Mohammed J. Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Qatar Computing Research Institute.

Usama Fayyad, as past Chair, will continue as the member of the SIGKDD executive committee.

Many thanks for their service to the SIGKDD officers who served in 2009-2013 and whose term has ended:

• Osmar Zaiane, SIGKDD Treasurer
• Robert Grossman, SIGKDD Director
• David Jensen, SIGKDD Director
• Sunita Sarawagi, SIGKDD Director
• Ramakrishnan Srikant, SIGKDD Director

Not surprisingly, all the newly elected and past officers have a Ph. D.

Researchers who organize and run KDD conferences do it all as volunteers. While this can be time-consuming and hard, this work is an important service to the community. It is also important for advancing research in the field, since it was conferences like KDD, ICDM, ECML/PKDD, SIGMOD, and others that stimulated the technical advances which led to the current successes of Big Data and Predictive Analytics.

KDD grew from the KDD-89 - first workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which I organized in 1989, 1991, and 1993. The workshops grew into a KDD-95 conference (chaired by Usama Fayyad and Ramasamy Uthurusamy), and continued every year since 1995, and as part of ACM since 1999. Microsoft Research ranks KDD as #1 of 41 conferences on data mining.

I chaired the KDD Steering committee from 1989 to 1999. Dr. Won Kim was instrumental in forming SIGKDD as part of ACM and served as its chair until 2005. I served as SIGKDD Chair in 2005-2009, and was succeeded by Dr. Usama Fayyad (2009-2013).