2024 IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award: Professor Geoff Webb

Dr. Geoff Webb is a Professor in the Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Monash University, Australia. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests include Machine Learning, Data Science, Pattern Discovery, Time Series Classification and Concept Drift.

In 2000, Professor Webb published a sole-authored paper entitled MultiBoosting: A Technique for Combining Boosting and Wagging (Machine Learning 40(2), pp 159-196), which has attracted 933 citations on Google Scholar as of November 12, 2024. MultiBoosting was a significant early contribution to ensemble learning, predating, for example, Random Forests. This paper showed the key ensemble techniques of the time, and provided a key conceptual foundation for ensemble learning.

He developed several of the key mechanisms of support-confidence association discovery in the 1980s. His OPUS search algorithm remains the state-of-the-art in rule search. He pioneered multiple research areas as diverse as black-box user modelling, interactive data analytics and statistically-sound pattern discovery. He has developed useful machine learning algorithms that are widely deployed. His translational data science research includes contributions in computational protein biology and health.

Professor Webb was Editor-in-Chief of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, from 2005 to 2014. He has been Program Committee Chair of both IEEE ICDM and ACM SIGKDD, as well as General Chair of ICDM and member of the ACM SIGKDD Executive Committee. His awards include the inaugural Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science (2017), the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Distinguished Research Contributions Award (2022), the IEEE ICDM 10-year Highest Impact Award (2023), and membership of the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia Academy (2024).

2024 IEEE ICDM Nomination and Evaluation Committees

• Xindong Wu (Co-Chair), Hefei University of Technology, China
• Xingquan Zhu (Co-Chair), Florida Atlantic University, USA
• Charu Aggarwal, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, New York, USA
• James Bailey, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Diane Cook, Washington State University, USA
• Peter Flach, University of Bristol, UK
• Eamonn Keogh, University of California Riverside, USA
• Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Claudia Plant, University of Vienna, Austria
• Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, China
• Chengqi Zhang, University of Technology Sydney, Australia