Director, Data Mining and Personalization, Amazon.com

Ronny Kohavi is now the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com.  He was previously the Vice President of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini Software, and prior to that he was the senior director of data mining at Blue Martini, where he led the engineering group responsible for the data collection, analysis, visualization, reporting, and campaign management modules in Blue Martini's applications.  Prior to joining Blue Martini, Kohavi managed the MineSet project, Silicon Graphics' award-winning product for data mining and visualization.  He joined Silicon Graphics after getting a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Stanford University, where he led the MLC++ project, the Machine Learning library in C++ now used in MineSet and at Blue Martini Software.  Kohavi received his BA from the Technion, Israel.  He was the General Chair for KDD 2004.  He co-chaired KDD 99's industrial track with Jim Gray and the KDD Cup 2000 with Carla Brodley.  He was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Engineering in 2000, a keynote speaker at PAKDD 2001,  and an invited speaker at KDD 2001's industrial track.  He co-chaired WEBKDD 2000, WEBKDD 2001, and WEBKDD 2003, and co-taught with Jon Becher a tutorial on e-commerce and clickstream mining at the SIAM Data Mining conference in 2001.  He co-edited with Foster Provost the special issue of the journal Machine Learning on Applications of Machine Learning and the special issue of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal on Applications of Data Mining to Electronic Commerce, now available as a book.  He is a member of the editorial board for the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery journal from its inception and served as a member of the editorial board for the journal of Machine Learning from 1997 to 1999.