Usama Fayyad

Usama M. Fayyad Ph.D
Residence London, England and San Francisco Bay Area
Citizenship U.S.
Nationality USA
Fields Computer Science Electrical Engineering
Institutions NASA JPL California Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Southern California, UTS, HKPU and Monash University; and Adviser to Data Science Institute of Imperial College in London.
Known for

Expertise in:

  • Data Science & discovery
  • Data Mining & Big Data
  • Machine Learning & Applied Data Science

Usama M. Fayyad (born July, 1965) is an American data scientist and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,.[1] He is a speaker on Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, and Big Data. He is currently the Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank.[2]

Early life

Fayyad was born to a Jordanian family in Carthage, Tunisia in July, 1965. and lived his early childhood in Tunisia and many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe. He graduated high school in Amman, Jordan from the National Orthodox School with GCE O-Levels. He spent most of his life in the U.S. having received his undergraduate and graduate education in Ann Arbor, MI at the University of Michigan[3]

Career

Fayyad holds BSE's in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He also earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991). Fayyad has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and databases. He holds over 30 patents and is a Fellow of both the AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). Fayyad has edited two influential books on data mining [4][5] and he launched and served as editor-in-chief of both the primary scientific journal in the field of data mining (Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery) and the primary newsletter in the technical community published by the ACM: SIGKDD Explorations. He continues to be active in the academic community, serving at Chairman of ACM’s SIGKDD Executive Committee which runs the world’s premiere data science, big data, and data mining conferences: the KDD international annual conferences.[6] Fayyad is a recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007)[7] and Service Award (2003) [1]  – the only person to ever receive both awards.

Fayyad is an active angel investor in the U.S. and in the Middle East. He is also part of the U.S. Dept of State Delegation on Entrepreneurship in the Middle East.[8] Fayyad is an active speaker in both academic and business meetings, and regularly delivers keynotes on BigData, Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Monetization Strategies, and Early-Stage Investment and Acceleration strategies for technology startups.

From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of Big Data in scientific applications (gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft) garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists – The Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Prior to founding his first startup in 2000, Fayyad was at Microsoft for five years. At Microsoft he led the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and headed the data mining products group for Microsoft's server division – especially SQL Server 2000 and Commerce Server 98. Fayyad’s work at Microsoft Research included the development of innovative data mining algorithms that scaled to very large databases and building up a new research program, as well as a new product line for Microsoft.

In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of Audience Science (originally digiMine, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and web analytics for some of the world's largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. He led the growth of the company from 3 employees to over 120 employees, raised over $45M in capital from top-tier venture firms, and helped attract the world’s top enterprises as customers. He stepped down as CEO and became Chairman in June 2003 in order to start DMX Group. Audience Science today is the leader in Behavioral Targeting and advertising networks. In 2003 Fayyad co-founded and led DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company that specialized in Big Data Analytics projects for several Fortune 500 clients. DMX Group was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004.

2004-2008 Fayyad served as Yahoo!'s Chief Data Officer & Executive VP responsible for Yahoo!'s global data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the company's data analytics and data processing infrastructure (which processed over 25 Terabytes of data per day). He was the industry’s first Chief Data Officer. Under his EVP role, Fayyad also founded and managed the Yahoo! Research Labs organization, which became the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, on-line marketing, Microeconomics, and algorithmic Advertising. At Yahoo! he applied Big Data techniques to content and advertising targeting and built the world’s largest group of data scientists – helping Yahoo! grow its revenues from user targeting by 20 times in 4 years.

In 2008, Fayyad founded Open Insights, LLC, a data strategy, technology and consulting firm based in Bellevue, WA to help enterprises understand data strategy and deploy data-driven solutions that effectively and dramatically grow revenue and competitive advantages. The company worked with some of the largest Internet and Mobile Operators to help develop Big Data technology, build technical teams, and develop new monetization strategies, as well as helped major private equity firms on strategic investment decisions relating to Big Data opportunities.[9]

In 2014 he became Chief Data Officer and Group Managing Director at Barclays PLC ; he is also Executive Chairman of Oasis 500. He was the first person to ever hold the title Chief Data Officer when Yahoo! Inc acquired his company in June 2004. Prior to Barclays he served as chairman, co-founder and CTO of ChoozOn Corporation —a mobile and web search engine service under the brand Blue Kangaroo that helps consumers find relevant offers, discounts, and deals through personalization and intelligent matching.

Recently he has been speaking on topics in FinTech such as blockchain [10]

KDD and SIGKDD

In 1995 Fayyad (with Ramasamy Uthurusamy) co-organized the First International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD-95), held at AAAI-1995 in Montreal, Canada.[11]

A good introductory article on Data Mining can be found in a special invited issue in AI Magazine.[12]

A year later, in 1996, Usama Fayyad launched the journal by Kluwer called Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery as its founding Editor-in-Chief. Later he started the SIGKDDD Newsletter SIGKDD Explorations.[13] The KDD International conference became the primary highest quality conference in Data Mining with a acceptance rate of research paper submissions below 18%. The Journal Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery is the primary research journal of the field.

Fayyad also organized the last KDD Workshop in 1994 (Seattle, WA) with Ramasamy (Sam) Uthurusamy (PDF file accessible at AAAI website) and the help of Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and transformed the workshops into an annual international conference on Data Mining.[14][15]

For both his service to the KDD and Data Science fields and his technical contributions in these arenas Usama Fayyad is the only recipient of both ACM SIGKDD Service award [16] and the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award.[17]

Fayyad was elected and served as a Director of the Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD when the SIGKDD group was formed as part of ACM to run the annual KDD conferences and help promote research in Data Mining, Data Science and Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Fayyad was elected Director of SIGKDD for 2001-2009 and was elected as Chairman of the Executive Committee of SIGKDD for 2009-2013.[18]

The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the leading research conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, according to Microsoft Academic search[19] and Google Scholar.[20] The 21st ACM SIGKDD conference was held in Sydney, Australia August 2015. Fayyad served as Honorary Conference Chair of KDD-2015 and helped Prof. Longbing Cao and Geoff Webb in organizing this conference.

Patents

Over 20 patents issued and over 30 patents pending, relating to technology in data mining, learning algorithms, data visualization, classification, clustering, database technology, and business applications and processes.

U.S.

Patent #

 Patent Title
8,712,832 Bid optimization in search engine marketing
7,822,745 Keywords set and target audience profile generalization techniques
7,624,106 User-sensitive pagerank
7,596,587 Multi-tiered storage
7,424,439 Data mining for managing marketing resources
7,194,477 Optimized a priori techniques
7,051,029 Identifying and reporting on frequent sequences of events in usage data
6,871,196 Visualizing automatically generated segments
6,735,589 Method of reducing dimensionality of a set of attributes used to characterize a sparse data set
6,633,852 Preference-based catalog browser that utilizes a belief network
6,643,645 Retrofitting recommender systems for achieving predetermined performance requirements
6,633,882 Multi-dimensional database record compression utilizing optimized cluster models recommender systems for achieving predetermined performance requirements
6,581,058 Scalable system for clustering of large databases having mixed data attributes
6,549,907 Multi-dimensional database and data cube compression for aggregate query support on numeric dimensions
6,496,208 Method and apparatus for visualizing and exploring large hierarchical structures
6,490,582 Iterative validation and sampling-based clustering using error-tolerant frequent item sets
6,449,612 Varying cluster number in a scalable clustering system for use with large databases
6,374,251 Scalable system for clustering of large databases
6,263,337 Scalable system for expectation maximization clustering of large databases
6,263,334 Density-based indexing method for efficient execution of high dimensional nearest-neighbor queries on large databases
6,216,134 Method and system for visualization of clusters and classifications
6,212,526 Method for apparatus for efficient mining of classification models from databases
6,115,708 Method for refining the initial conditions for clustering with applications to small and large database clustering
6,044,366 Use of the UNPIVOT relational operator in the efficient gathering of sufficient statistics for data mining
6,012,058 Scalable system for K-means clustering of large databases
6,567,936 Data clustering using error-tolerant frequent item sets

[21]

Personal life

Fayyad was born in Carthage, Tunisia and lived his early childhood in Tunisia and many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Southern Europe. He graduated high school in Amman, Jordan from the National Orthodox School with GCE O-Levels. He spent most of his life in the U.S. having received his undergraduated and graduate education in Ann Arbor, MI at the University of Michigan, and then lived in Pasadena, CA, Seattle, WA and Portola Valley, CA.

Fayyad has 4 children and now lives in Central London while he continues as Chairman of Oasis500 in Jordan and is an investor in several companies in the U.S. and Europe.

References

  1. 1 2 Fayyad, Dr. Usama. "U.M. Fayyad Recipient of 2003 SIGKDD Service Award". SIGKDD Service Award. ACM SIGKDD. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
  2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH8LKSVyXgA
  3. ↑ Fayyad, Usama. "Michigan Engineering". University of Michigan College of Engineering. University of Michigan. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
  4. ↑ Fayyad, Usama (1996). Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (1 ed.). Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. ISBN 0262560976. Retrieved 2 December 2010.
  5. ↑ Fayyad, Usama (2002). Information Visualization in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (1 ed.). San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN 1558606890. Retrieved 21 December 2010.
  6. ↑ Piatetsky-Shapiro, Gregory (October 2005). "Interview with Usama Fayyad, Yahoo Chief Data Officer". Sig KDD newsletter.
  7. ↑ Fayyad, Usama. "SIGKDD 2007 Innovation Award". SIGKDD.org. SIGKDD. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  8. ↑ Fayyad, Usama (14 Nov 2012). "U.S. Department of State Entrepreneurship Delegation" (PRN: 2012/1796). U.S. Department of State. Reuters. Retrieved 14 Nov 2012.
  9. ↑ "Interview Dr Usama Fayyad Founder Open Insights LLC". DECISION STATS. Retrieved 2016-01-14.
  10. ↑ Spaven, Emily; CoinDesk, News (23 April 2015). "SWIFT Panel". CoinDesk News (website) (CoinDesk). CoinDesk. Retrieved 1 December 2015.
  11. ↑ Conference Program Chair, KDD-1995. "First International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery". KDD-1995 First International Conference by AAAI. ACM SIGKDD. Retrieved 25 December 2010.
  12. ↑ Fayyad, Usama M.; Piatetsky-Shapiro, G.; Smyth, P.J. (Fall 1996). "From Data Mining to Knowledge Discovery in Databases". AI Magazine 17 (3): 37–54. ISSN 0738-4602. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  13. ↑ Fayyad, Usama (15 June 1999). "First Editorial by Editor-in-Chief". SIGKDD Explorations 1 (1): 1. doi:10.1145/2207243.2207269. Retrieved 27 December 2010.
  14. ↑ 3rd AAAI Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Databases, KDD-1994. "The 3rd Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Databases" (PDF). AAAI KDD-1994 Workshop. AAAI. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  15. ↑ Fayyad, Usama; Uthurusamy, Ramasamy (15 July 1994). Knowledge Discovery in Databases: Papers from the 1994 AAAI Workshop, Seattle, Washington, July 1994. Technical Report WS-94-03. (PDF) (1 ed.). Seattle, WA: AAAI Press. ISBN 0-929280-73-3. Retrieved 27 December 2015.
  16. ↑ Fayyad, Dr. Usama. "U.M. Fayyad Recipient of 2003 SIGKDD Service Award". SIGKDD Service Award. ACM SIGKDD. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
  17. ↑ Fayyad, Usama. "SIGKDD 2007 Innovation Award". SIGKDD.org. SIGKDD. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  18. ↑ About SIGKDD
  19. ↑ "Top conferences in data mining". Microsoft Academic Search. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  20. ↑ "Data Mining & Analysis". Google Scholar. Google. Retrieved 2015-09-22. 2. ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (Ranked #1 is a journal, not a conference.)
  21. ↑ https://www.google.co.in/?tbm=pts&gws_rd=cr,ssl&ei=qW6XVrehOIuJuAT03oeADA#newwindow=1&tbm=pts&q=usama+fayyad

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, January 15, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.