Features

SIGKDD has been one of the most successful ACM SIGs due to the close connection between data mining research and industry and the impact of our community on the world. I am honored to have this opportunity to run for the position of SIGKDD Director, and if elected, I will in particular try two address two issues.

Good research in data mining depends on the availability of interesting data. Most of the interesting data today is hidden inside large Internet companies and not accessible to most researchers. I will work on establishing a dialogue with Internet companies to establish large publicly available datasets for the research community that will enable everybody to evaluate data mining methods on real data.

Data mining is a quickly changing field, and due to our high rate of innovation new methods emerge constantly. If elected, I will work on creating a "commons" for educational material such as tutorial videos, slides, and survey papers that our community can build upon to teach the next generation of students in data mining. My larger vision is a generally improved online presence of SIGKDD with an active forum for discussions and an exchange of ideas and experiences between and within practitioners and academics.

Biography
Johannes Gehrke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Johannes' research interests are in the areas of data mining and data privacy, and applications of database and data mining technology to marketing and the sciences. Johannes has received a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Arthur P. Sloan Fellowship, an IBM Faculty Award, the Cornell College of Engineering James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship. He is the author of numerous publications on data mining and database systems, and with Raghu Ramakrishnan, he co-authored the undergraduate textbook Database Management Systems (McGrawHill (2002), currently in its third edition), used at universities all over the world. Johannes is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Troms� in Norway.

Johannes was co-Chair of the 2003 ACM SIGKDD Cup, Program co-Chair of the 2004 ACM International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2004), and Program Chair of the 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2007). He is on the editorials boards of ACM TKDD, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and the Machine Learning Journal. From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Scientist at FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. At Cornell, Johannes teaches in the Department of Computer Science, the Information Science Program, and in the Johnson Graduate School of Management.