Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

Abstract

It is my great honor and pleasure to welcome you to ACM SIGKDD's 17th Annual Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD2011, being held in San Diego, California, from August 21 through August 24, 2011. This year's KDD Conference continues its tradition of being the premier forum for the sharing of leading edge research results and industrial experiences of KDD theory, technology, and applications, among it's multi-disciplinary participants from academia, government, and industry. The KDD2011 organization committee has worked hard to help organize this year's conference, and to ensure that it maintains its pre-eminent position as the top worldwide conference for dissemination of cutting edge technical progress of this community. The science and business of extracting actionable insights from data has never been more important. We are experiencing an explosion of data, and the consequent interest in analyzing this information in a timely and rigorous fashion. Data and content volumes are expected to grow exponentially in the next decade. Much of the new growth is expected to dominantly come from unstructured content; documents, images, audio and video. These trends are setting up the stage for a fascinating set of new research challenges, and simultaneously driving the need for accelerated deployment of our research advances, ranging from algorithmic advances in core modeling and learning techniques, to scalable methods for parallel and distributed mining of massive scale data, to new paradigms for consumption and delivery of the analytic insights. It is my hope that attendees at this conference will be able to sense and appreciate the impressive progress our community is making in addressing these challenges. We have made a few changes this year to the traditional KDD conference format, to address the growing interest in this technology. The conference will begin as always with workshops and tutorials on Sunday, and then we have a full 3-day program for the main body of the conference. The extended 3-day main program has allowed us to include additional keynote plenary talks and make space for some exciting new content. We are launching a new track this year, called the Industry Practice Expo. The aim of the IPE track is to bring in eminent practitioners of KDD from industry to share with the participants their in depth experiences on what it means to successfully deploy working instances of high impacting KDD solutions.