Rayid Ghani

Rayid Ghani is the Director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy, Chief Data Scientist at the Urban Center on Computation and Data, Research Director at the Computation Institute (a joint institute of Argonne National Laboratory and The University of Chicago), and a Senior Fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is also the co-founder of Edgeflip, an analytics startup that grew out of the Obama 2012 Campaign, focused on social media products for non-profits, advocacy groups, and charities.

Ghani is currently in charge of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship,^[1] at the University of Chicago.^[2]

Education and Career

Ghani completed his schooling at the Karachi Grammar School, in Karachi, Pakistan.^[3] Ghani completed his graduate studies in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University with Tom M. Mitchell on Machine Learning and Text Classification and received his undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from University of the South.

Before his current role at the University of Chicago, he was the Chief Scientist of the Obama 2012 Campaign.^[4][5] Before that, he was a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Analytics research at Accenture Labs where he led a technology research team focused on applied R&D in analytics, machine learning, and data mining for large-scale and emerging business problems.

Research Contributions

Ghani's research focuses on developing and applying analytics, machine learning, data mining methods to large scale social problems in areas such as education, healthcare, energy, transportation, and public safety.^[6] His work has previously focused on text analytics,^[7] fundraising, volunteer, and voter mobilization^[8] using analytics, social media,^[9] and machine learning.,^[10][11] and data mining.^[12] Rayid's research contributions have been in the areas of text mining, co-training, active learning, consumer behavior modeling,^[13] and fraud detection.

He has given keynote speeches on Analytics and the Presidential Elections (for example at Predictive Analytics World,^[14] Digital Leaders Forum,^[15] Carnegie Mellon University,^[16] and CeBIT Australia^[17][18]), on Business Applications of Data Mining,^[19] and Data Science for Social Good.

Selected publications

• Data Mining for Business Applications. Editors: Carlos Soares, Rayid Ghani. Book. IOS Press 2010.

• Mining the Web to Add Semantics to Retail Data Mining. R. Ghani. Invited Paper. Web Mining: From Web to Semantic Web. Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3209. Berendt, B.; Hotho, A.; Mladenic, D.; van Someren, M.; Spiliopoulou, M.; Stumme, G. (Eds.) 2004

External links

• Official website

References