Features

ACM SIGKDD is pleased to announce that Sunita Sarawagi is the winner of its 2009 SIGKDD Service Award.

Sunita Sarawagi is being recognized through the SIGKDD Service Award for her significant contributions and services to the KDD community over the past decade.

She was an Associate Editor of the SIGKDD Explorations from 1999 to 2000 and was the editor-in-chief from 2003 to 2005. During this time, she worked closely with many colleagues in the community and turned SIGKDD Explorations into the most important news letter and one of the most popular information channels for the KDD community. She has also served on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD, and on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on KDD (TKDD), ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), and Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning. Professor Sarawagi has been very active in organizing KDD conferences. In particular, she served as the Program Committee Chair of KDD 2008.

She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, she was a research staff member at IBM Almaden Research Center. Since 1999, she has been on the faculty of IIT Bombay, where she is currently an Associate Professor. She received her Bachelors of Technology degree in 1991 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She is well known for her work on information extraction and integration based on statistical learning techniques and multidimensional data analysis. She has contributed open source software for information extraction using Conditional Random Fields, duplication elimination using active learning, and a toolkit called ICube for mining multidimensional OLAP products.

Previous SIGKDD Service Award winners include Robert Grossman (2007), Won Kim (2006), the Weka team lead by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank (2005), Xindong Wu (2004), Usama Fayyad (2003), Ramasamy Uthurusamy (2002) and Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (2000).

The SIGKDD Innovation and Service awards will both be presented at KDD-2009, hosted by ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) in Paris, France from June 28 - July 1, 2009. Following the award presentation, Padhraic Smyth will present the Innovation Award Lecture.

About SIGKDD
SIGKDD www.kdd.org ACM's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, is the major professional organization for data mining and knowledge discovery researchers and professionals, focusing on the advancement of the science and practice of knowledge discovery and data mining.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About the KDD Service Award
The ACM SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery. It is given to one individual or one group who has performed significant service to the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including professional volunteer services disseminating technical information to the field, leading organizations or projects that contribute technically to the field as a whole, furthering KDD education, or increasing funding to the KDD community. The award includes a financial prize of $2,500.