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Awards2009 Innovation Award: Dr. Padhraic SmythPadhraic Smyth is recognized for his contributions to both the theory and application of probabilistic and statistical approaches to data mining. Smyth’s research is in the area of statistical data mining and machine learning. His research focuses on both the basic principles of inference from data (theory and algorithms), combined with applications to a variety of data-driven problems in the sciences, medicine, and engineering. A central theme in his work is the use of probabilistic hidden variable models and unsupervised learning for modeling complex data. He has made contributions in the areas of mixture models, hidden Markov models, graphical models, model-based clustering, clustering of curves and sequences, topic models for text data, pattern and event detection in time-series, and model selection. He is also well known for his work on applying these techniques to a variety of application problems involving large data sets. For example, in climate and planetary science he has worked on clustering of storm tracks in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, seasonal forecasting of rainfall in the tropics, analysis of global geopotential height patterns, and classification algorithms for detecting volcanoes in images of Venus. Other applications include clustering of user navigation patterns on Web sites, spatial modeling of brain images, analysis of time-course gene expression data, and event detection in large-scale traffic sensor data. Smyth received a first class honors degree in Electronic Engineering from University College Galway (National University of Ireland) in 1984, and the MSEE and PhD degrees from the Electrical Engineering Department at the California Institute of Technology in 1985 and 1988 respectively. From 1988 to 1996, he conducted research at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since 1996 he has been at UC Irvine where he is currently Professor in the Department of Computer Science, with joint appointments in the Department of Statistics and in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and is a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, and the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations. He is also the founding director for the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems at UC Irvine. He is a coauthor of a graduate text in data mining, Principles of Data Mining, MIT Press, with David Hand and Heikki Mannila, and is also co-author of Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms, Wiley, 2003 (with Pierre Baldi and Paolo Frasconi). He was co-editor of Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, AAAI/MIT Press, 1996 (with Usama Fayyad, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, and Samy Uthurusamy). He has served as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and the Machine Learning Journal, and has served as an editorial board member for the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. About the KDD Innovation AwardThis award is given to one individual or one group of collaborators who has made significant technical innovations in the field of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery that have been transferred to practice in significant ways, or that have significantly influenced direction of research and development in the field. The award includes a financial prize of $2,500. See past Innovation Awards Here 2009 Service Award: Dr. Sunita SarawagiSunita Sarawagi is recognized for her significant contributions and services to the KDD community over the past decade. Sarawagi 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. Sarawagi 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. Sarawagi 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. About the KDD Service AwardThe 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. See past Service Awards Here
Student Travel AwardsStudent Travel Awards will be available for students attending KDD-2009.Click here for more information. |
