Usama Fayyad

USAMA FAYYAD is President and Chief Executive Officer of
digiMine, Inc., a Seattle-based company that provides hosted data
warehousing and data mining solutions, which he co-founded in
March 2000. Prior to digiMine, Dr. Fayyad founded and led
Microsoft Research’s Data Mining & Exploration Group from 1995 to
2000. His work there included developing data mining prediction
components for Microsoft Site Server (Commerce Server 3.0 and
4.0). He also developed scalable algorithms for mining large
databases and led their development into server products such as
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and OLAP Services. He helped establish
a new industry standard in data mining based on Microsoft’s OLE
DB API. From 1989 to 1995, Dr. Fayyad founded the Machine
Learning Systems Group and developed data mining systems for the
analysis of large scientific databases at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology. During that
time he received the most distinguished excellence award from
Caltech/JPL and a US government medal from NASA. He remained
affiliated with JPL as Distinguished Visiting Scientist after
joining Microsoft. Dr. Fayyad has a PhD in Engineering from the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991). He also holds two BSEs
in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1984), an MSE in Computer
Science and Engineering (1986), and an MS in Mathematics (1989).
He is Editor-in-Chief of several renowned technical journals and
newsletters, and served as program co-Chair of KDD-94 and KDD-95
(the international conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data
Mining) and as General Chair of KDD-96 and KDD-99. He is a
Director of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGKDD
and serves as Editor-in-Chief of its newsletter SIGKDD
Explorations.