Cornell Department of Computer Science Colloquium
4:15pm, October 25th, 2001
B17 Upson Hall

Data Mining Evolved: Challenges, Applications, and Future Trends

Usama Fayyad, Ph.D.
President and CEO digiMine, Inc.

Data Mining has received much attention as companies and organizations started to ask how they can better utilize the huge data stores they built up over the past two decades. While some interesting progress has been achieved over the past few years, especially when it comes to techniques and scalable algorithms, very few organizations have managed to benefit from the technology. This paradoxical situation of having too much data yet not be able to utilize it or mine it arose because of both technical and business challenges. We will cover these challenges, paint a picture for where the data problems are, and then introduce data mining and its role. The coverage of data mining will be at multiple levels: a few algorithms for scaling to large databases, aspects and challenges for fitting data mining with database systems, and finally business challenges of how to make the technology really work. In this coverage, we will span the spectrum from technical to business issues. We shall also cover applications in the business setting to illustrate the challenges and contributions of data mining in eBusinesses as an example. We conclude by revisiting the technical challenges facing the field.

Bio of Usama Fayyad:

Dr. Fayyad is co-founder, President and CEO of digiMine, Inc. a privately held company of about 120 employees focused on data mining and business intelligence solutions. Prior to digiMine, Dr. Fayyad founded and led Microsoft Research's Data Mining & Exploration (DMX) Group. At Microsoft he also led the development of data mining components within Microsoft products, including SQL Server 2000. From 1989 to 1995, Dr. Fayyad was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, where he founded and grew a multi-million dollar advanced research program to develop data mining systems for the analysis of large scientific databases. This world-renowned work earned him numerous awards including the most distinguished excellence award from Caltech/JPL and a U.S. Government Medal from NASA. Dr. Fayyad has published over 100 technical articles and is co-editor of two books on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. He is very active in the KDD community and has served as program co-chair of KDD-94 and KDD-95 (the 1st International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) and as general chair of KDD-96 and KDD-99. He is Editor-in-Chief of the scientific technical journal: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.  He is a Director of the ACM Special Interest Group on knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) and Editor-in-Chief of its newsletter: SIGKDD Explorations. He was recently named to MIT's Tech Review Magazine list of top 10 (TR-10) innovators in emerging technologies. He serves on several Editorial Boards including the Communications of the ACM.