2012 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award: Professor Wei Wang

The IEEE ICDM Outstanding Award is given to one individual or one group who has made major service contributions that have promoted data mining as a field and ICDM as the world's premier research conference in data mining. The 2012 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award goes to Dr. Wei Wang, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Los Angeles, USA.

Wei Wang was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2002 to 2012 and a research staff member at IBM from 1999 to 2002. She has a long history of promoting ICDM and the data mining field. She has been actively involved in ICDM since its inception in 2001 as a paper author, reviewer, and organizer. She has served as General Co-Chair (2011), Program Co-Chair (2009), Awards Chair (2010), Program Vice Chair (2007, 2010, 2012) and a Program Committee member (2004, 2005, 2006, 2008).

She has served the broader data mining community as well. She was Awards Chair (2009), Asia Pacific Track Chair (2012), a Senior Program Committee member (2006, 2010, 2011), and a Program Committee member (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008) of the ACM SIGKDD Conference. She served as Publicity Chair (2009), Proceedings Chair (2008), a Senior Program Committee member (2011, 2012),and a Program Committee member (2007, 2008) of the SIAM Data Mining conference. She was as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering from 2003 to 2007 and an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery in Data from 2005 to 2009. She has been an associate editor of Knowledge and Information Systems since 2007.

Wei Wang has also made significant contributions to the research areas of clustering high-dimensional data, sequential pattern mining, and graph mining. She is a pioneer in applying data mining methods to biomedical domains. She has published over 150 research papers including two best paper awards. Her articles received thousands of citations in Google Scholar.

Dr. Wang has been very active in recruiting, mentoring, and promoting young researchers, especially students from underrepresented groups, in the data mining field. She led the effort of applying for NSF support for student travel awards to ICDM 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Together with industrial sponsorships, ICDM 2011 was able to support 64 students to attend the conference, who were not able to make the trip otherwise. This is a record high number of student travel awards in the ICDM history. A half of the travel award recipients were female or minority students.

2012 IEEE ICDM Nomination and Evaluation Committees

Christopher W. Clifton (Co-Chair), Purdue University, USA
Xindong Wu (Co-Chair), University of Vermont, USA
David J. Hand, Imperial College, London, UK
Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota, USA
Heikki Mannila, University of Helsinki, Finland
Shusaku Tsumoto, Shimane University, Japan
Benjamin W. Wah, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Osmar R. Zaiane, University of Alberta, Canada

From Xindong Wu (xwu AT uvm.edu) on October 15, 2012.