Yahoo! Heats Up at KDD 2008
The heat was on as Yahoo! repeated its standout presence at the 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 08), held August 24 to 27 in scorching Las Vegas, NV. Aside from earning the honor of 9 out of 95 total accepted research track papers this year and 1 accepted industrial/government applications track paper, Yahoo! took home the highest technical award from the conference for the 2nd year in a row: the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award.
Researcher Raghu Ramakrishnan made big news as recipient of the Innovation Award. This is the highest prize in the fields of data mining and knowledge discovery. It is awarded annually to the individual who has made technical innovations in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery that have been transferred to practice in significant ways, or that have greatly influenced the direction of research and development in the field. Former Chief Data Officer Usama M. Fayyad received the award last year.
Ramakrishnan was honored for his contributions that span foundational technical innovation on algorithmic and systems aspects of data mining. His work on scalable data mining algorithms started with BIRCH, the first truly scalable clustering algorithm. Additionally, Ramakrishnan was recognized for his work on data anonymization, and applying the multi-dimensional model from OLAP to develop a framework for exploratory data mining.
After Ramakrishnan received his award, he presented the Innovation Award lecture – an insightful talk in which he made several connections between academic research and industry.
Yahoo! also sizzled with 9 accepted research track papers and 1 accepted industrial/government applications track paper. Researcher Ravi Kumar earned a record 4 accepted research track papers this year.
Microscopic Evolution of Social Networks.
Jure Leskovec, Lars Backstrom, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins.
A Sequential Dual Method for Large Scale Multi-Class Linear SVMs.
S. Sathiya Keerthi, S. Sundararajan, Kai-Wei Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Chih-Jen Lin.
Efficient Semi-streaming Algorithms for Local Triangle Counting in Massive Graphs.
Luca Becchetti, Paolo Boldi, Carlos Castillo, Aristides Gionis.
The Structure of Information Pathways in Social Communication Networks.
Gueorgi Kossinets, Jon Kleinberg, Duncan Watts.
A Semi-Supervised Approach to Rapid and Reliable Labeling of Large Data Sets.
Gyorgy J. Simon, Vipin Kumar, Zhi-Li Zhang, Francesco Bonchi.
Topical Query Decomposition.
Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Aristides Gionis.
De-duping URLs via Rewrite Rules.
Anirban Dasgupta, Ravi Kumar, Amit Sasturkar.
Generating Succinct Titles for Web URLs.
Deepayan Chakrabarti, Ravi Kumar, Kunal Punera.
Influence and Correlation in Social Networks.
Aris Anagnostopoulos, Ravi Kumar, Mohammad Mahdian.
Identifying Authoritative Actors in Question-Answering Forums - The Case of Yahoo! Answers.
Mohamed Bouguessa, Benoit Dumoulin, Shengrui Wang.
Several workshops and invited talks were given by Yahoo! Researchers. Michael Schwarz presented “Internet Advertising and Optimal Auction Design.” Barcelona researchers Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, and Aristides Gionis talked about “Query-log Mining for Detecting Polysemy and Spam.” And David Pennock gave the talk “An Empirical Study of Dynamic Pari-mutuel Markets: Evidence from the Tech Buzz Game.” The talks demonstrated the influence of social media and economics in data mining.
“KDD is an exciting venue precisely because it is at the confluence of data mining, social media, large scale text and graph analysis and monetization,” remarked one conference attendee.
