Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Ph.D. is the Founder of KDnuggets, a leading site for Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Gregory was a President of KDnuggets from its creation until December 2021. Gregory is a co-founder of KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data mining conferences), a co-founder and past chair of ACM SIGKDD, a professional association for Data Mining and Data Science, and a well-known expert in the field. He has been ranked no. 1 in LinkedIn Top Voices 2018: Data Science & Analytics and was included in many lists of top AI and Data Science experts and influencers. Here is his Wikipedia entry.

Analytics and Data Science Consulting
Experience
Professional Activities & Conferences
Gregory's KDnuggets Blogs
Presentations & Tutorials
Research Publications
Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro in the Media

Contact Information

Bio: Gregory led data mining and consulting groups at GTE Laboratories, Knowledge Stream Partners, and Xchange. He has extensive experience developing CRM, customer attrition, cross-sell, segmentation and other models for some of the leading banks, insurance companies, and telcos. He also worked on data analysis of clinical trial, microarray, and proteomic data for several leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies.

Gregory served as an expert witness and provided expert opinions in several cases.

Gregory was the President of KDnuggets, a leading site covering Business Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, and Data Mining, from its creation until Dec 2021. This includes KDnuggets News, e-newsletter on data mining and knowledge discovery (published since 1993), KDnuggets.com site, (published since 1997) a popular resource for data mining and analytics news, software, jobs, courses, data, education, and more.

Gregory is the founder of Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) conferences. He organized and chaired the first three Knowledge Discovery in Databases workshops in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and then chaired the KDD Steering Committee until 1998, when he co-founded ACM SIGKDD, the leading professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He served as Director (1998 - 2005) and was elected SIGKDD Chair (2005-2009 term).

Gregory has over 60 publications, with over 10,000 citations, including 2 best-selling books and several edited collections on topics related to data mining and knowledge discovery.

Gregory was the first recipient of ACM SIGKDD Service Award (2000). He also received IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award (2007) for contributions to data mining field and community.

Personal

Gregory is the son of Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro. Here is Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro memorial page.

Experience

1994 to 2021, President, KDnuggets.
Created KDnuggets to connect KDD researchers and grew to a global resource and a leading site for Business Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, Data Science and Knowledge Discovery.

KDnuggets received many awards and honors and frequently appears among the top influencers in Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, Data Science, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning.

Gregory Piatetsky is featured on many lists as a top influencer for Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science.

2001-2014, Business Analytics and Data Mining Consultant.
Applied data mining and knowledge discovery methods to business and medical applications. Significant projects included:

Developed methods for identifying suspected on-line auction fraud
Analyzed web usage logs for a large web publisher to improve visitor conversion
Analyzed memory drug effectiveness and relationship between pharmakinetics and pharmadynamics
Analyzed proteomic datasets for biomarkers of a neurological disease; found a number of novel diagnostics.
Developed link analysis and customer grouping algorithm for a telephone company.
Was an invited expert in Shell workshop on technology impact in 2025.
Analyzed drug effectiveness in clinical trials for a large pharmaceutical company.
Analyzed DNA microarrays and found a new gene marker for a type of brain tumor.
Worked with a state agency to develop predictive models for child support non-payment and attrition.
Consulted on several technology-related lawsuits and served as an expert witness in patent-related and trade-secret related lawsuits.

2003 to 2004, Research Associate Professor, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Participated in research on microarrays data analysis; prepared and submitted NIH and NSF grant applications related to microarray data analysis.

Spring 2004, Visiting Professor, Computer Science, Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, South Korea. Taught classes on data mining and bioinformatics.

Fall 2003, Visiting Professor, Computer Science, Connecticut College, New London, CT. Developed and taught a course in Machine Learning and Data Mining. Developed modules for courses in Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Introduction to Programming and Computer Science.

4/2000 to 5/2001, Vice-President and Chief Scientist, Xchange, Boston, MA, an analytical CRM and campaign management company. Gregory led the development of Adaptive Learning Engine to support multi-channel, complex customer interaction in real-time. Prior to that, Gregory led Xchange analytics consulting group and participated in a number of consulting engagements on the topics of CRM, data mining, customer attrition, cross-sell, and finding profitable uses for customer data.

3/1997 to 3/2000, Director and later Vice-President and Chief Scientist at Knowledge Stream Partners (KSP), Boston, MA, a consulting and software development company which specialized in advanced data mining and customer analytics. KSP was purchased by Xchange in April 2000.
Gregory led a consulting team that worked with some of the leading banks, brokerages, telcos, insurance companies, and etailers. The engagements included

Retail customer segmentation for a major European bank
Analysis of design and business focus for a Japanese pharmaceutical company
Attrition models for credit products for a major US bank
Mortgage default models for a major Latin American bank
Analysis of reserve needs for a major car lease financing company
Analysis of interest rate sensitivity for a major insurance company
Developing value-attrition and optimized cross-sell models for a global financial institution
Analyzing e-tail operations and identifying cross-sell opportunities and shopping cart abandonment

Gregory also led the development of component-based Knowledge Discovery Engine consulting tools, and KSP consulting methodology.

1985 to 1997, Senior and later Principal Member of Technical Staff at GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA, world-wide research lab for GTE, major telephone company (now part of Verizon). Gregory started and led the first Knowledge Discovery in Databases project in the world (1989-1997). The project focused on developing and deploying advanced data mining and knowledge discovery systems for business applications. Developed CHAMP system (1996-97) for Churn Analysis, Modeling and Prediction of behavior of cellular phone customers. CHAMP had a 3-level architecture, with a data engine integrated with GTE Wireless data warehouse, discovery engine combining decision trees, neural networks, and other modeling approaches, and a browser-based front-end based. CHAMP was applied to all of GTE's 4 million cellular customers and was nominated for GTE's highest technical achievement award.

Prior to CHAMP, Gregory led the development of KEFIR (Key Findings Reporter), described in Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, a system for analysis and summarization of key changes in large databases. KEFIR automatically analyzed changes in all relevant variables, selected the important ones, and added, where possible, expert recommendations on what to do about the changes. KEFIR prototype was applied to GTE health care database and has received Leslie H. Warner award, GTE's highest award for technical achievement. Before KEFIR, Gregory worked on developing intelligent front-ends to heterogeneous databases and natural language front-ends.

1981 to 1985, Senior Analyst at Strategic Information Systems, Burlington, MA. Designed, developed and implemented financial database query and reporting systems. Developed innovative query optimization methods and self-organizing database indices.

Education

Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro earned his M.S. (1979) and Ph.D. (1984) from New York University Dept. of Computer Science. His Ph.D. dissertation on "Self-Organizing Database Systems" received NYU awards as the best dissertation in computer science and the best dissertation in all natural sciences.

Professional Societies, Conferences

Gregory is the founder of Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) conference series. He organized and chaired the first three Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) workshops in 1989, 1991, and 1993. He then served as the Chair of KDD Steering committee and guided the conversion of KDD workshops into leading international conferences on data mining. He also was the General Chair of the KDD-98 conference.

Gregory played a key role in creation of ACM SIGKDD, the leading professional organization for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He was elected in 2001 as a director of SIGKDD, and in 2005 as the Chair of SIGKDD. In August of 2000, he received the first SIGKDD Service Award for his contributions to the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery community.

Gregory also served (2001-2015) on the Steering Committee of ICDM, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, a leading international forum for data mining research.
In 2007 Gregory received IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award for contributions to data mining.

He also was on program committees of numerous other conferences and workshops on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Databases and was a Senior Program Committee member of AAAI-99 (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) and AAAI-2000.

Gregory actively promoted standards in the data mining field and participated in 2 industry standard-setting activities:

CRISP - Cross-Industry Standard Process Model, which developed industry- and tool-neutral Data Mining process model.
PMML - Predictive Modeling Markup Language, XML-based, vendor independent language for describing data mining models.

Publications

Here is a list of selected publications and presentations.

Gregory edited or co-edited many collections on data mining and knowledge discovery, including two best-selling books: Knowledge Discovery in Databases (AAAI/MIT Press, 1991) and Advances in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (AAAI/MIT Press, 1996), and has over 60 publications in the areas of data mining, artificial intelligence and database research.

Gregory presented many talks and tutorials on data mining related topics.

He was a founding co-editor in chief of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal, and was an Associate Editor of TKDD, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD).

Gregory served on the editorial board of Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Kluwer, 1993-2008; he was on the editorial board of the Big Data Journal (2009-2018), and was an Honorary Member of Scientific Advisory Board for Data ScienceTech Institute, (Paris/Nice, France).

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