Dr. Usama Fayyad
Dr. Usama Fayyad is Executive Chairman of Oasis 500, a regional early-stage fund and entrepreneurship initiative based in Jordan and aiming to create an early-stage/angel stage investment base in the region along with funding up to 500 start-ups in technology (ICT and interactive media focus). He is also Chairman of d1g.com, a new generation Internet community and rich media content sharing site focused on Arabic Speaking online audiences. In the U.S. he is CEO of Open Insights, LLC, a data strategy, technology and consulting firm he founded to help enterprises understand data strategy and deploy data-driven solutions that effectively and dramatically grow revenue and competitive advantages. Until September 2008, he was Yahoo!’s chief data officer and EVP of Research & Strategic Data Solutions. The industry’s first chief data officer, he was responsible for Yahoo!’s global data strategy, architecting Yahoo!’s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company’s data analytics and data processing infrastructure. He also founded and managed the Yahoo! Research organization globally. Yahoo! Research is the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, on-line marketing, and innovative interactive applications.
Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. DMX Group International still operates in the Middle East and is headquartered in Dubai. In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine Inc (Audience Science/Revenue Science, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and web analytics for some of the world’s largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. The company today specializes in Behavioral Targeting and advertising networks. Fayyad’s professional experience also includes five years spent leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and building the data mining products for Microsoft’s server division. From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of scientific databases gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.
Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), he also holds BSE’s in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining and Artificial Intelligence, is a Fellow of the AAAI (association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and a Fellow of the ACM (association of Computing Machinery), has edited two influential books on the data mining. He launched and served as editor-in-chief of both the primary scientific journal in the data mining filed (<em>Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery</em>) and the primary newsletter in the technical community published by the ACM: <em>SIGKDD Explorations</em>. He holds over 25 patents in Information Technology. More details on Usama’s background, see his personal web site at: http://www.fayyad.com/usama
