Han Honored by IEEE Computer Society with 2009 W. Wallace McDowell Award

Jiawei Han, a professor of computer science, has received the 2009 W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society “for significant contributions to knowledge discovery and data mining." 

The W. Wallace McDowell Award is given annually to a single individual to recognize outstanding recent theoretical, design, educational, practical, or other similar innovative contributions that fall within the scope of Computer Society interest. Previous recipients of the award include: John Backus, Seymour Cray, Gordon Bell, Grace Murray Hopper, Don Knuth, Maurice Wilkes, Ken Kennedy, Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, Ray Ozzie.

Han has done groundbreaking work in the area of data mining, information network analysis, data warehousing, stream mining, spatiotemporal and multimedia data mining, text and Web mining, and software bug mining, with over 400 conference and journal publications.

“The rise of data mining reflects the imminent needs of today's computerized, data-intensive society,” Han said. “Data mining is an exciting scientific discipline since it requires us to integrate and advance the knowledge produced in multiple disciplines, including database systems, statistics, machine learning, algorithms, information theory, spatial and multimedia databases, bioinformatics, Web technology, and high performance computing, among others.”

Han’s recent work includes the development of new techniques for information quality management and validation, information search and integration, and information discovery and analysis. He and his research team are also investigating new data mining techniques for analyzing flight safety data.  The project aims to find computing methods to better understand anomalous flight events and improve airline safety. To reach this goal, the team will employ data mining and contextual text mining techniques, among others, to classify, cluster, and build links between data elements.

Han has chaired or served in over 100 program committees of international conferences and workshops and also served or is serving on the editorial boards for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Computer Science and Technology, and Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. He is currently the founding editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD).

Han has received IBM Faculty Awards, HP Innovation Award, the Outstanding Contribution Award at the International Conference on Data Mining, ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award, and IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award.

He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. He is currently the director of Information Network Academic Research Center (INARC) supported by the Network Science-Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS-CTA) program of U.S. Army Research Lab. His book Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (Morgan Kaufmann) has been used worldwide as a textbook.
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Contact: Jiawei Han, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-6903.

Writer: Jennifer LaMontagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.