Yahoo! Chief Data Officer Receives Top Technical Award for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

Yahoo! today announced that Dr. Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and executive vice president of research and strategic data solutions, has been awarded the 2007 Innovation Award by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). ACM's SIGKDD Innovation Award is the highest technical award in the fields of data mining and knowledge discovery. This award recognizes individuals who have either driven significant innovations that have transferred to industry practice in impactful ways or who have significantly influenced the direction of research and development in these areas.

"ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Usama Fayyad with its 2007 Innovation Award," said Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, chair of ACM SIGKDD. "Dr. Fayyad made major contributions to the advancement of the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including machine learning and data mining algorithms that scale to large commercial database systems and the development of fundamental applications in mining massive science data sets that have lead to significant new scientific discoveries."

Fayyad's contributions span fundamental technical innovation and significant large-scale applications of science data analysis, commercial practice and commercial database systems. From his early work on applications of data mining and statistical pattern recognition to massive scientific data sets in Astronomy and Planetary Geology to co-authoring new SQL Extensions and leading development work for embedding data mining algorithms inside of Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 system, Fayyad has led significant scientific advances and new discoveries in these fields. Before joining Yahoo!, Fayyad led two successful startups focused on data mining, business intelligence and targeting algorithms. At Yahoo!, Fayyad is responsible for the company's overall data strategy as well as overseeing the Yahoo! Research organization.

"This award highlights the importance of technical innovation in real applications and in building analysis systems at a massive scale and I'm honored to be recognized by my peers, leaders of the community and the field as a whole," said Fayyad. "At Yahoo!, advancements in data mining and knowledge discovery are making it possible for us to better understand how our customers use our products and what the future of the Internet experience will be. We are focused on creating advanced data insights technology that will enable Yahoo! to build next-generation web applications by learning about the dynamics and growth of online communities and the technologies for information navigation of the future."

The award will be presented at the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining on August 12, 2007 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

More...