Data Mining and Search

I noticed in the news that data mining specialist Rakesh Agrawal joined Microsoft Search Labs. Dr. Agrawal is perhaps best known for his work co-authoring a paper with Dr. Tomasz Imielinski and Dr. Arun Swami in 1993 on data mining, titled Mining Association Rules between Sets of Items in Large Databases.

I thought it was worth noting that Agrawal's co-author, Dr. Imielinski, is a member of our New Jersey research and development center. This Association Rules paper is one of the most frequently cited papers ever on the subject of data mining and Tomasz has received several international awards recognizing the long-term impact of his work.

On a personal note, I first met Tomasz in the late 1990's when I was a technical director at Dun & Bradstreet, seeking out ways to understand and present the massive amounts of business data being captured.  He was both computer science chair at Rutgers University (where else?) and a leading expert in data mining and mobile computing, among other things. His stories of the vibrant ideas and opportunities he found at Ask.com helped to attract me here as an employee last year -- and he was right.

As a bonus, Dr. Imielinski also plays one heck of a mean guitar, in blues and heavy metal, writing original songs with local band System Crash. The band has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Newark Star-Ledger, and The Home News Tribune (New Brunswick).
Full disclosure: I'm also the bass player.

James Jeude
Ask.com Senior Product Manager