Memories of KDD-2019 - going all the way back to 1989...

Samy Uthurusamy - KDD Conference co-founder and Champion of Alaska

Over the course of four perfect summer days in Anchorage, Alaska, I had the privilege and pleasure of attending KDD-2019. Over 3200 Data Scientists, Data Analysts, KDD practitioners and business people, and Machine Learning professionals descended upon this beautiful place. The unlikely combination of cutting-edge research and beautiful surroundings made for a surreal experience.

What made it super-special for me personally was a reunion with Samy Uthurusamy. The KDD community decided to honor Samy for pushing the community to hold the conference in Anchorage. At the time, we - as organizers of the conference - were worried that we would not get enough attendance at this remote location. We had just held the 24th conference in London, and had a record attendance of 2800 attendees. I personally worried that we would not hit 1000 attendees in Anchorage. However, Samy persisted in his proposal.

Sure enough, his vision was right and most of us were wrong. Of course, I consider this a huge win-win for the field. I wanted to publicly acknowledge him and express my gratitude and the field's gratitude for his continued involvement and contributions.

[Photo on the left: Samy Uthurusamy and Usama Fayyad at the KDD2019 Opening Session.]

For me, this occasion was special on so many levels. 24 years ago, when I co-organized KDD-1995 in Montreal, Canada, Samy was my co-chair. I remember celebrating with him when we attracted about 250 attendees... How far have we come?

Watching Samy being honored at the Opening Session of KDD2019 was definitely one of the highlights of the conference for me personally. The community actually gave him a well-deserved standing ovation. A very emotional moment for me personally...

The photo on the right shows Samy being honored by the organizing committee: Vipin Kumar, Ankur Tederesai, and Ted Senator.

In reflecting over the years, my memories with Samy have been truly special: I first met him when I spent the Summer of 1987 as a Research Intern at GM Research Labs in Warren, MI. Samy - all the way back in 1987 - had a group named: Applied Machine Learning Research Group. Can you imagine?

Samy insisted that I attend the first ever KDD Workshop, held at the IJCAI-89 conference in Detroit in July 1989 (I was still a graduate student and spending that summer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA). The workshop was organized by our dear friend Gregory Piatesky-Shapiro who at the time was at GTE Labs (now Verizon). Samy and I presented our joint research work there and co-wrote a chapter in the Knowledge Discovery in Databases book that was published after the workshop. That collaboration later led to the two of us co-chairing the 1994 KDD Workshop held at AAAI-1994 and the next year converting to an International Conference: the 1st International Conference on Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - KDD-1995, in Montreal, Canada, where we served as Program Committee Co-Chairs. Later, Samy, Gregory and I, in collaboration with my dear friend and colleague for many years at NASA- JPL: Padhraic Smyth, co-edited the book: Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining which was published in 1996 by MIT Press.

Our collaborations continued through the decades as we co-organized many conferences together in Artificial Intelligence and in KDD. I hope we continue to work together and I continue to admire Samy for his bold vision and his relentless pushing of the AI, KDD and Data Science communities to do more, achieve more, dream more, and have more fun.

On behalf of the entire Data Science community, I want to say: Thank you Samy for all that you have done!