ACM SIGKDD is pleased to announce that Dr. Gabor Melli is the winner of its 2013 Service Award. Dr. Gabor Melli is recognized for his substantial technical contributions to the practice and application of data mining and for his outstanding service to the global KDD community.

ACM SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD). It is conferred on one individual or one group for their outstanding professional services and contributions to the field of knowledge discovery and data mining.

Dr. Melli has a long history of serving the KDD community, starting in 1997 with his release of the synthetic dataset generator at datasetgenerator.com. Next, in 2005, he co-founded the Data Mining Case Studies workshop series (dataminingcasestudies.com) and became the SIGKDD Information Director. Since then he has helped to organize many KDD, ICDM and CIKM international conferences in roles such as Publication Chair, Workshops Chair, Sponsorship Chair, Contest Chair, Exhibits Chair, and Demo Chair, while serving as a paper referee for KDD, CIKM, PAKDD, and ACM Computing Surveys. More recently Dr. Melli has initiated a project to semi-automatically create an extensive web knowledge base of KDD concepts (gabormelli.com/RKB/).

Dr. Melli received a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University. He has published over 25 papers in the field (google.com/citations?user=VVmkSAYAAAAJ). Professionally, Dr. Melli is the Chief Scientist at VigLink Inc., a San Francisco-based content monetization platform where he is driving revenue for leading websites through his research into data-driven solutions to semantic information processing. Prior to VigLink, Dr. Melli led projects at large organizations such as Microsoft, AT&T wireless, Verizon, and Wal*Mart. (linkedin.com/in/melli)

The previous SIGKDD Service Award winners were Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ramasamy Uthurusamy, Usama M. Fayyad, Xindong Wu, the Weka team led by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank, Won Kim, Robert Grossman, Sunita Sarawagi, Osmar R. Zaiane, R. Bharat Rao, and Ying Li.

The award will be presented at the Opening Plenary Session of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, on August 11, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois.

ACM SIGKDD is pleased to present Dr. Gabor Melli its 2013 Service Award for his outstanding service and contributions to the global KDD community.

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2013 ACM SIGKDD Awards Committee

Bharat Rao (Deloitte)
Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon University)
Osmar Zaiane (University of Alberta)
Padhraic Smyth (University of California, Irvine)
Ross Quinlan (Rulequest Research)
Ramasamy Uthurusamy (General Motors Corporation)
Sunita Sarawagi (Indian institute of technology)
Usama Fayyad (ChoozOn Corporation)
Vipin Kumar (University of Minnesota)
Ying Li (Concurix Corporation) – Chair of Awards Committee