Title: On Fusion of Heterogeneous Data Sources for Mining Big Data Speaker: Philip S. Yu

Abstract: The problem of big data has become increasingly importance in recent years. On the one hand, big data is an asset that potentially can offer tremendous value or reward to the data owners. On the other hand, it poses tremendous challenges to distil the value out of the big data. The very nature of big data poses challenges not only due to its volume, and velocity of being generated, but also its variety, where variety means the data can be collected from various sources with different formats from structured data to text to network/graph data, etc. In this talk, we focus on the variety issue and discuss the recent development in fusion of information from multiple data sources, which can be applied to multiple applications and disciplines. As the number and variety of social networks aimed at different purposes increase rapidly, users nowadays are participated in multiple online networks simultaneously to enjoy various services. How to fuse information spreading across multiple networks to achieve better understanding of customers and provide higher quality of services becomes the Holy Grail. Social networks will be used as an example to explain how to address the data fusion issue.

Bio: Dr. Philip S. Yu is a Distinguished Professor and the Wexler Chair in Information Technology at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining UIC, he was at the IBM Watson Research Center, where he built a world-renowned data mining and database department. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Dr. Yu is the recipient of ACM SIGKDD 2016 Innovation Award for his influential research and scientific contributions on mining, fusion and anonymization of big data, the IEEE Computer Society’s 2013 Technical Achievement Award for “pioneering and fundamentally innovative contributions to the scalable indexing, querying, searching, mining and anonymization of big data”, and the Research Contributions Award from IEEE Intl. Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in 2003 for his pioneering contributions to the field of data mining. Dr. Yu has published more than 1,000 referred conference and journals papers cited more than 84,000 times with an H-index of 136. He has applied for more than 300 patents.

Dr. Yu is on the steering committee of ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management and was a steering committee member of the IEEE Data Engineering and the IEEE Data Mining Conference.  He was the Editor-in-Chiefs of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (2011-2017) and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2001-2004). He received the ICDM 2013 10-year Highest-Impact Paper Award, and the EDBT Test of Time Award (2014). He had received several IBM honors including 2 IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, 2 Research Division Awards and the 94th plateau of Invention Achievement Awards.  He was an IBM Master Inventor. Dr. Yu received his PhD from Stanford University.

Title: TBD Speaker: Usama Fayyad

Abstract: TBD

Bio: Usama M. Fayyad, Ph.D. is Chief Data Officer and Group Managing Director at Barclays in London where his responsibilities include data governance, information risk management and the data infrastructure for BI, data warehousing, BigData and analytics technologies across the Barclays Group globally.

He is also Chairman of Oasis500 in Jordan following his appointment in 2010 by King Abdullah II of Jordan to be the founding Executive Chairman. Oasis500 a tech startup investment fund that runs an accelerator, entrepreneurship training program, and angel investment network that aims to fund 500 Internet and Technology startups in the MENA Region.

Up until September 2008, Fayyad was based in Sunnyvale, CA 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 with offices around the world 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 scientist – helping Yahoo! grow its revenues from user targeting by 20 times in 4 years. After Yahoo! and prior to Barclays he 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.

In 2003 Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company that was specializing in BigData Analytics major projects with some of the Fortune 500 clients. DMX Group was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of Audience Science (digiMine, Inc.), a venture backed company addressing hosted business analytics and leading the market in targeted advertising.

From 1995 to 2000, Fayyad was at Microsoft in Redmond, WA where he led the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and headed the data mining products group for Microsoft’s server division. 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.

Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), and also holds BSE’s in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and databases. He holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and a Fellow of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery), has edited two influential books on the data mining and 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. He is a recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007) and Service Award (2003) – the only person to receive both awards.

Title: ABCD for AI System Speaker: Yong Rui

Abstract: In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a sudden and accelerated growth. And big data has played a critical role in its rapid rise. In some specific areas, AI has even begun to surpass human intelligence. Therefore, AI has attracted extensive attention from the industry and society. Dr. Yong Rui is a scientist as well as a corporate executive. He has been working on artificial intelligence research for years and has also got extensive experience in industry R&D. In the speech, he sums up the four key drivers of artificial intelligence systems (the initials of the four drivers happen to be A, B, C and D ),expounds the intrinsic relationship between artificial intelligence and big data, and explores the causes of the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. Moreover, Dr. Rui will discuss how to objectively evaluate the development of artificial intelligence and its future prospects with other distinguished guests present at the forum.

Bio: Dr. Yong Rui is currently the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group. He is responsible for overseeing Lenovo’s corporate technical strategy, research and development directions, and Lenovo Research organization, which covers intelligent devices, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 5G and smart lifestyle-related technologies.

Before joining Lenovo, Dr. Rui worked for Microsoft for 18 years. His roles included Senior Director and Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) (2012-2016), GM of Microsoft Asia-Pacific R&D (ARD) Group (2010-2012), Director of Microsoft Education Product in China (2008-2010), Director of Strategy (2006-2008), and Researcher and Senior Researcher of the Multimedia Collaboration group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA (1999-2006).

A Fellow of IEEE, IAPR and SPIE, and a Distinguished Scientist of ACM, Dr. Rui is recognized as a leading expert in his fields of research. He is a recipient of many awards, including the 2017 ACM TOMM Nicolas Georganas Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award and the 2010 Most Cited Paper of the Decade Award from Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation. He holds 62 US and international issued patents. He has published 4 books, 12 book chapters, and 260 referred journal and conference papers. With over 18,000 citations, and an h-Index of 58, his publications are among the most referenced.

Dr. Rui is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE MultiMedia magazine, an Associate Editor of ACM Trans. on Multimedia Computing, Communication and Applications (TOMM), and a founding Editor of International Journal of Multimedia Information Retrieval. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia (2004-2008), IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems for Video Technologies (2006-2010), ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal (2004-2006), International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (2004-2006) , and IEEE Access. He also serves on the Advisory Board of IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering.

Involved in many facets of the field, Dr. Rui is a member of numerous organizing and program committees for conferences including ACM Multimedia, ACM ICMR, IEEE ICME, SPIE ITCom, and ICPR. He was General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia in 2009 and 2014, ACM ICMR in 2006 and 2012, and ICIMCS in 2010, and Program Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia in 2006, Pacific Rim Multimedia (PCM) in 2006, and IEEE ICME in 2009. He is on the Steering Committees of ACM Multimedia, ACM ICMR, IEEE ICME and PCM. He was an Executive Member of ACM SIGMM, and the founding Chair of its China Chapter.

Dr. Rui served as a member of review panels for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Australian Research Council, and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong. He is a Guest Professor of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Zhejiang University, and Southeast University.

Dr. Rui received his BS from Southeast University, his MS from Tsinghua University, and his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).