KDD 2017 is the 23rd SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, one of the world’s largest and best Data Science conferences. Started in 1989, KDD is the oldest & largest data mining conference worldwide. We pioneered “Big Data”, “Data Science”, and “Predictive Analytics” solutions before these names even existed – some of the first & most highly cited research papers on these topics were published in our conference. Other notable innovations that originated in our conference include crowd sourcing; large scale data mining competitions with over 10,000 participants, personalized advertising, e.g., on Google, graph mining algorithms that power Facebook & LinkedIn, and recommender systems used by Netflix, Amazon, etc. After 25 years and an explosive growth in this industry, we are still the home for the latest cutting-edge research in these topics. Even today, the technology & research discussed at our conference is often 1-3 years ahead of any other conference!
Profile of Attendees & Organizers
In 2016, KDD attracted over 2700 leading researchers in about equal parts from universities, industry, as well as some participation from governmental entities including NIH, NSF, DARPA, and National Laboratories.
Uniquely among the large analytics & machine learning conferences, we have an equal emphasis on both theoretical advances and large real-world impact that benefits millions of customers. Hence, we have separate but equally prestigious research and application tracks for the papers presented at the conference. We also invite several leaders from various industries to present at the conference to foster a cross breeding of ideas. Over the years, this interaction between the leading practitioners at large companies & startups on the one hand, and the algorithm development researchers (including leading academics) on the other has proven to be a fertile ground for tremendous technological and entrepreneurial innovation. As a result, KDD regularly spawns new product features & technologies for companies, and new research problems for our academic colleagues. Many successful entrepreneurs who first emerged from our research community still actively participate in our conference and mentor the next generation of innovators. While the list of such mentors & thought-leaders is very long, as an illustrative example panel members from KDD2013’s panel session on “A Data Scientist’s Guide to Making Money from Start-ups” included Usama Fayyad, serial entrepreneur, VC, and former Chief Data Officer for Yahoo!, Oren Etzioni, serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Ron Bekkerman, a VC at Carmel Ventures who formerly led engineering teams at LinkedIn, and Claudia Perlich, the chief scientist of Dstillery.
Continuing a long tradition, the KDD 2017 conference continues to be organized & run by high-powered volunteers including entrepreneurs, data science industry leaders, leading professors and other thought leaders who consider this a way to give back to our community.