Usama Fayyad
Dr. Usama Fayyad is Yahoo!'s executive vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions. Fayyad is responsible for Yahoo!'s overall data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data analytics and data processing infrastructure. The analysis and management of data within Fayyad's group enables Yahoo! to ensure customer satisfaction and develop innovative products and services that are essential to consumers' lives. Fayyad also oversees the Yahoo! Research organization that includes offices in Sunnyvale, Burbank and Berkeley, CA as well as New York, Europe, and S. America. Yahoo! Research is building the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, on-line marketing, and innovative interactive applications. Dr. Fayyad is co-founder, President and CEO of digiMine, Inc. a privately held company of over 100 employees focused on data mining and business intelligence solutions. Prior to digiMine, Dr. Fayyad founded and led Microsoft Research's Data Mining & Exploration (DMX) Group. At Microsoft he also led the development of data mining components within Microsoft products, including SQL Server 2000. From 1989 to 1995, Dr. Fayyad was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, where he founded and grew a multi-million dollar advanced research program to develop data mining systems for the analysis of large scientific databases. This work solved some significant scientific problems and earned him numerous awards including the most distinguished excellence award from Caltech/JPL and a U.S. Government Medal from NASA. Dr. Fayyad has published over 150 technical articles and is co-editor of two books on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Databases.