Our Charter
Motivation
The field of Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining has grown rapidly in recent years. Massive data sets have driven research, applications, and tool development in business, science, government, and academia. The continued growth in data collection in all of these areas ensures that the fundamental problem which KDD addresses, namely how does one understand and use one's data, will continue to be of critical importance across a large swath of organizations.
The Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining field stands today where the database field stood about 15 years ago. There are over a 100 companies providing data-mining tools and applications, consulting and seminars, and even specialized hardware. The field is in the early adoption phase in the market, and we expect that within about 3-5 years, commercial products and the vendors will start entering the maturation phase. Within the next 10 years, in some form, the technology of data mining and knowledge discovery in data will become an integral part of the client/server enterprise information technology.
Complementing business activities, there is considerable emerging research in the fields of databases, machine learning, applied statistics, visualization, and other fields relevant to data mining and knowledge discovery. This is evidenced by the recent emergence of successful KDD conferences in the US, Europe, and Asia as well as the successful launch in 1997 of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal >>.
ACM
ACM >> is the first and the premiere computing society in the world. ACM has a number of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) in fields related to KDD, including SIGMOD >> (Database Research), SIGIR >> (information retrieval), and SIGART >> (artificial intelligence).
We announce the formation of SIGKDD -- ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining -- a Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Society under the umbrella of ACM. Focus of SIGKDD
The primary focus of SIGKDD is to provide the premier forum for advancement and adoption of the "science" of knowledge discovery and data mining. To do this, the SIGKDD will encourage
- basic research in KDD (through annual research conferences, newsletter and other related activities)
- adoption of "standards" in the market in terms of terminology, evaluation, methodology
- interdisciplinary education among KDD researchers, practitioners, and users
Despite all the activities, both in the market and in R&D laboratories, the field is in its infancy. Many of the commercial products do not have the robustness, scalability, and functionality that customers require. Various data-mining algorithms impose serious restrictions on their application. The process of knowledge discovery and data mining is far from automated, and therefore can be quite difficult to use effectively. Cooperation
The field of knowledge discovery and data mining is an interdisciplinary one, requiring cross fertilization of several fields, as noted earlier. Therefore, SIGKDD will work closely with other related ACM SIGs, including SIGMOD, SIGART, SIGMIS, SIGIR, SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, etc., as well as non-ACM societies, such as AAAI, IEEE, ASA (American Statistical Association), etc. The collaboration will take the form of in-cooperation (and possibly co-sponsorship) arrangements for the annual SIGKDD conferences, and possible cross publication of relevant technical articles and informational data in the newsletters.
Researchers and practitioners from fields other than computer science (such as statistics and mathematics) will be particularly welcome in SIGKDD.
Against this backdrop, many of the leaders of the field have agreed to the formation of an international society on knowledge discovery and data mining as an ACM SIG. In particular, the KDD Conference steering committee, composed of former program and general chairs of previous KDD conferences, has enthusiastically supported the formation of SIGKDD.
SIGKDD Activities
The initial activities of SIGKDD will include converting the KDD conference into a SIGKDD annual conference, and creating a SIGKDD newsletter. The newsletter will publish invited and submitted technical articles, news, user stories, etc. The conference will publish a proceedings of all accepted technical papers on both research and applications in the field of KDD. The conference will include presentations of technical papers, tutorials, panel discussions, prototype exhibits, etc.
The SIGKDD Bylaws and the initial year budget have both been approved by the ACM SIG Board on June 13, 1998.