Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the premier international forum for data science, data mining, knowledge discovery and big data. It brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. KDD-2014 features plenary presentations, paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, exhibits, and the KDD Cup competition. We are happy to announce that this year we are partnering with Bloomberg to emphasize our theme of Data Science for Social Good. To this end, part of our workshop and tutorial program will be held at the Bloomberg facilities together with Bloomberg-specific events, all focusing on issues pertaining to social good. Today, you hear a lot about data science, big data and data intensive computing. The core of this work is extracting knowledge and useful information from data, which for science leads to beautiful insights, and for applications leads to actions, alerts and decisions. The KDD community has always been at the center of this activity and it is clear from this conference that it will continue to drive this broader field of data science. This year we had a record number of submissions. There were 1036 submissions to the Research Track, and 151 papers were accepted. There were 197 submissions to the Industry and Government Track, and 44 papers were accepted. KDD also has a history of inviting talks that are of broad interest to the KDD community. This year we chose to have 4 plenary talks. A program committee also selected 8 talks to present at the Industry and Government track. A strength of the KDD conference is the number of workshops and tutorials that are co-located with it. This year there were 9 full-day workshops, 16 half-day workshops, and 12 tutorials. As part of our partnership with Bloomberg on the theme of social good, Bloomberg will have 3 workshops jointly located with our workshops at their New York Office. Our community is a unique blend of industry and academia, ranging from people starting their career to leaders in their respective fields. This year, we are piloting programs to facilitate networking amongst these groups. Specifically, we have a networking lounge for industry and job-seekers to meet and we helped find good matches. We also have a networking event focused on defining what a data science career looks like and have senior members meet young people to help them understand the skills needed and what a job in this discipline might entail.