Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro
Gregory I. Piatetsky-Shapiro (born 7 April 1958) is a data scientist, co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining,[1] and President of [2] a site providing Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science. For simplicity, he usually abbreviates his name as Gregory Piatetsky.
Early life
Piatetsky was born to a Jewish-Russian family in Moscow, Russia. His father, Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro, was a well-known mathematician. He was admitted in 1970 to the Physics-Mathematics School N. 2 in Moscow.
In March 1974 Piatetsky emigrated to Israel with his mother, Inna. There, he studied mathematics at Tel-Aviv University, and computer science for one semester at Technion. He then received a MS (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) at NYU Courant Institute. His first paper, published in SIGMOD in 1984, proved that secondary index selection is NP-complete by reducing it to set cover problem. However, in his dissertation he proved that the greedy method for set cover has a lower bound of 1 - 1/e ~ 63% of the optimal.
Career
After getting his Ph.D. in 1985, he joined GTE Laboratories in 1985, where he worked on intelligent interfaces to databases. In 1989 he proposed a new project at GTE called "Knowledge Discovery in Databases". The project created a number of advanced prototypes, including KEFIR (Key Findings Reporter), a system for analysis and summarization of key changes in large databases, which was a forerunner of systems like Google Analytics Intelligence. A KEFIR prototype was applied to GTE health care data and received GTE's highest technical award.
In 1997 he left GTE to join Knowledge Stream Partners (KSP), where he was Director and later Vice President and Chief Scientist. In April 2000, KSP was acquired by Xchange, Inc.,[3] where Piatetsky served as VP and Chief Scientist.
Piatetsky left Xchange in May 2001 to become a self-employed consultant and is now focused on running KDnuggets .
KDD and SIGKDD
In 1989 Piatetsky organized the first workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Data (KDD-89), held at IJCAI-1989 in Detroit, MI.[1] This workshop had over 60 attendees, including researchers Ross Quinlan and Jaime Carbonell.
He organized the next two KDD workshops in 1991 (Anaheim) and 1993 (Washington, DC).[1] With Usama Fayyad and Ramasamy (Sam) Uthurusamy, he grew the workshops into an annual international conference on Data Mining and was the General Chair of the KDD-98 conference.
He served as the chair of the KDD Steering committee until 1998, when the SIGKDD group was formed as part of ACM to run the annual KDD conference and help promote research in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He served as Director of SIGKDD for 2001-2005 and as SIGKDD Chair for 2005-2009.[4]
In 1997 Piatetsky and Ismail Parsa initiated the KDD Cup competition, which was the first open data mining contest in the world.
The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the leading research conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, according to Microsoft Academic search[5] and Google Scholar.[6] The 21st ACM SIGKDD conference was held in Sydney, Australia August 2015.
KDnuggets
In 1993, Piatetsky started Knowledge Discovery Nuggets as a newsletter to connect researchers who attended the KDD-93 workshop. With the appearance of World Wide Web and Mosaic, he and Chris Matheus created a website Knowledge Discovery Mine,[7] hosted at GTE Labs. The newsletter served as an unofficial publication of KDD workshops ].
When Piatetsky left GTE Labs in 1997, he created the KDnuggets website,[8] which stands for Knowledge Discovery Nuggets, with the mission of covering the field with short, concise "nuggets". The resource started as a directory of main areas of data mining and data science, including Software, Jobs, Academic positions, CFP (calls for papers), Companies, Courses, Datasets, Education, Meetings, Publications, and Webcasts.
At present, its KDnuggets' main focus is to cover the news in the field of Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science, including interviews with many key leaders of the field. It also offers a free data mining course for advanced undergraduates or first-year graduate students.[9]
@KDnuggets Twitter was
- Voted the Best Big Data Tweeter by Big Data Republic (2013)
- In Top 10 Most Influential Brands on Big Data, Onalytica, May 2017.
- No. 1 in Agilience Top Authorities in Machine Learning, Nov 2016.
- No. 1 in Agilience Top Authorities for Data Mining, No. 2 for Data Science, Nov 2016.
- No. 3 in AI Intelligence & Machine Learning: Top 100 Influencers and Brands, Onalytica, Mar 2016.
- No. 4 in Big Data 2016: Top 100 Influencers, Onalytica, Feb 2016.
- In InformationWeek Twitter Top 10 Data Science, Analytics, And BI Feeds, Jan 2016
In February 2015, Piatetsky and Data ScienceTech Institute announced a partnership and he became an Honorary Member] of its Scientific Advisory Board [10]
Research and publications
In 1991 Piatetsky and William (Bud) Frawley edited the first book on Knowledge Discovery in Databases, and in 1996, Gregory Piatetsky, Usama Fayyad, Padhraic Smyth, and R. Uthurusamy edited a follow-up Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Piatetsky also helped launch and was a co-editor of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal. He has 9 edited books and collections and over 60 technical papers, articles and book chapters, mostly focusing on data mining and knowledge discovery.
Awards and recognition
- 1984, NYU Award for Best Dissertation in Computer Sciences, Ph.D. Thesis: "A Self-Organizing Database System - A Different Approach to Query Optimization".
- 1985, NYU Award for Best Dissertation in all Natural Sciences (1985).
- 1995, Leslie H. Warner award—GTE's highest for technical achievement—for the KEFIR system.
- 2000, First SIGKDD Service Award, for contributions to Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.[1]
- 2007 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award, for major contributions to data mining field, 2007.[11]
References
- 1 2 3 4 "Dr. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro - SIGKDD Service Award". ACM SigKDD. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro has received the first ACM SIGKDD Service award for starting the KDD conferences and contributions to the KDD community, including KDnuggets newsletter. Dr. Piatetsky-Shapiro is the founder of the Knowledge Discovery in Database conference series (KDD, now the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).
- ↑ KDnuggets
- ↑
- ↑ About SIGKDD
- ↑ "Top conferences in data mining". Microsoft Academic Search. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
- ↑ "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.) - ↑
- ↑
- ↑
- ↑
- ↑ Wu, Xindong (2007-09-28). "2007 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award: Dr. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro". IEEE ICDM. Retrieved 2015-09-22.
Dr. Piatetsky-Shapiro is the founder of the Knowledge Discovery in Database conference series (KDD, now the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining).
- Journeys to Data Mining: Experiences from 15 Renowned Researchers, edited by Mohamed Medhat Gaber