Features

A member of SIGKDD since its inception, I have participated at KDD since the first 1995 conference and served at many levels of the organization of our annual conference. I also co-founded MDM/KDD and helped co-organize WebKDD workshops for many years. I am a firm believer in this community and the potential for the society at large.

Data mining, at the confluence of many fields, is maturing as a discipline, and has and will continue to have a tremendous impact on our society. Now is the time to emphasize the value of community and highlight the importance of integrating our technologies in compelling data management systems and convenient applications. I would like to work with SIGKDD to strengthen our community for better communication and collaboration by means of social networking or other processes. SIGKDD has a positive impact on many data miner careers, young and experienced, and we want to sustain and improve this influence in an ever-growing community.

My goal is to work with SIGKDD and the community at large in supporting more collaboration and promoting the significance and beneficial values of knowledge discovery and data mining in our society though convincing and practical applications.

Biography
Osmar R. Zaiane is a McCalla Professor in Computing Science at the University of Alberta, Canada. He obtained his Ph.D., from Simon Fraser University, Canada, in 1999 under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Han. He has research interests in novel data mining algorithms, web mining, text mining and image mining. His current research focuses on the application of Data mining in health care.

Osmar Zaiane is the Scientific Director of the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning.

He has published more than 100 papers in refereed international conferences and journals, and taught on all six continents.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM SIGKDD Explorations, as well as Associate Editor of the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, and Knowledge and Information Systems, An International Journal, by Springer.

He was the program co-Chair for IEEE-ICDM 2007, the International Conference on Data Mining and general co-Chair for ADMA 2007 The Advanced Data Mining and Applications conference. He was the co-chair of the ACM SIGKDD International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining in 2000, 2001 and 2002 as well as co-Chair of the ACM SIGKDD WebKDD workshop in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2008. He has served in the organizing committee of numerous conferences and is on the steering committee of ICDM and ADMA. For SIGKDD, he served as proceedings chair in 2002, Publicity chair in 2002 and 2003; webmaster in 2002and 2003; and currently exhibits and demos chair.