Technology >> CEO Interviews >> March 24, 2003

Usama Fayyad – Digimine Inc

USAMA FAYYAD is President and Chief Executive Officer of digiMine, Inc., a Seattle-based company that provides hosted data warehousing and data mining solutions, which he co-founded in March 2000. Prior to digiMine, Dr. Fayyad founded and led Microsoft Research's Data Mining & Exploration Group from 1995 to 2000. His work there included developing data mining prediction components for Microsoft Site Server (Commerce Server 3.0 and 4.0). He also developed scalable algorithms for mining large databases and led their development into server products such as Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and OLAP Services. He helped establish a new industry standard in data mining based on Microsoft's OLE DB API. From 1989 to 1995, Dr. Fayyad founded the Machine Learning Systems Group and developed data mining systems for the analysis of large scientific databases at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology. During that time he received the most distinguished excellence award from Caltech/JPL and a US government medal from NASA. He remained affiliated with JPL as Distinguished Visiting Scientist after joining Microsoft. Dr. Fayyad has a PhD in Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991). He also holds two BSEs in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1984), an MSE in Computer Science and Engineering (1986), and an MS in Mathematics (1989). He is Editor-in-Chief of several renowned technical journals and newsletters, and served as program co-Chair of KDD-94 and KDD-95 (the international conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) and as General Chair of KDD-96 and KDD-99. He is a Director of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGKDD and serves as Editor-in-Chief of its newsletter SIGKDD Explorations. Profile
TWST: Would you give us a brief summary of digiMine?

Dr. Fayyad: digiMine is a technology service provider that

delivers solutions to help our clients understand the behavior of

their