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On-line, interconnected systems offer unprecedented opportunities for discovery and learning from the wealth of data they produce. Extracting useful knowledge from such data is becoming more difficult, as volume and complexity push traditional techniques beyond their limits. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) techniques automate the process of extracting knowledge from data. The annual ACM SIGKDD conference brings together researchers and practitioners focusing on new developments and challenges in KDD brought about by this data explosion.

The conference features tutorials, keynote addresses by data-mining leaders in industry and academia, workshops, academic and industry paper and poster presentations, exhibits, and the ever-popular KDD-CUP competition, where universities and data mining companies compete to mine the best nuggets from real data.

This year's agenda is not yet complete, but as an example of what to expect here are some hilights from last year's conference:

• over 900 attendees from over 30 countries
• five keynote addresses by CEO's of large software companies and leading researchers
• standing-room-only tutorials and workshops
• over 20 exhibitors
• research papers on classification, association rules, visualization, interactive knowledge exploration, mining the web, etc.
• business papers on applications in marketing, manufacturing, medicine, finance, aerospace, e-commerce, telephony, etc.
• a lively KDD-CUP competition with 35 competitors analysing data from a web retail site to answer questions such as "Given a set of page views, which product brand will the visitor view in the remainder of the session?"

Please save the date and visit the website http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/kdd2001/ for the most up-to-date information about the conference.

George H. John              xenon.stanford.edu/~gjohn
Data Mining Guru, E.piphany www.epiphany.com