SIGKDD, representing the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, is an organization that hosts an annual conference.

Conference history The KDD Conference grew from KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining) workshops at AAAI conferences, which were started by Gregory I. Piatetsky-Shapiro in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and Usama Fayyad in 1994. Conference papers of each proceedings of the SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining are published through ACM. KDD is widely considered the most influential forum for knowledge discovery and data mining research.

Year Conference location 2011 San Diego, United States 2012 Beijing, China 2013 Chicago, IL, United States 2014 New York City, NY, United States 2015 Sydney, Australia 2016 San Francisco, CA, United States 2017 Halifax, Canada 2018 London, England 2019 Anchorage, AK, United States2020San Diego, CA, United States2021Virtual Conference 2022Washington, D.C., United States 2023Long Beach, California, United States2024Barcelona, Spain 2025Toronto, ON, Canada

The KDD conference has been held each year since 1995, and SIGKDD became an official ACM Special Interest Group in 1998. Past conference locations are listed on the KDD conference web site.

The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is recognized as a flagship venue in the field. Based on statistics provided by independent researcher Lexing Xie in her analysis “Visualizing Citation Patterns of Computer Science Conferences“ as part of the research in Computation Media Lab at Australian National University: 4489 papers were published at ACM SIGKDD conference over in the years 1994–2015 (inclusive). These 4489 papers had received 112570 citations in total across 3033 venues. 56% of these 3033 venues are recognized as top 25 venues in the field.

The annual conference of ACM SIGKDD has received the highest rating A* from independent organization Computing Research and Education (a.k.a. CORE).

Selection Criteria

Like all flagship conferences, SIGKDD imposes a high requirement to present and publish submitted papers. The focus is on innovative research in data mining, knowledge discovery, and large-scale data analytics. Papers emphasizing theoretical foundations are particularly encouraged, as are novel modeling and algorithmic approaches to specific data mining problems in scientific, business, medical, and engineering applications. Visionary papers on new and emerging topics are particularly welcomed. Authors are explicitly discouraged from submitting papers that contain only incremental results or that do not provide significant advances over existing approaches.

In 2014, over 2,600 authors from at least fourteen countries submitted over a thousand papers to the conference. A final 151 papers were accepted for presentation and publication, representing an acceptance rate of 14.6%. This acceptance rate is slightly lower than those of other top computer science conferences, which typically have a rate of 15–25%. The acceptance rate of a conference is only a proxy measure of its quality. For example, in the field of information retrieval, the WSDM conference has a lower acceptance rate than the higher-ranked SIGIR.

Awards The group recognizes members of the KDD community with its annual Innovation Award and Service Award.

Each year KDD presents a Best Paper Award to recognizes papers presented at the annual SIGKDD conference that advance the fundamental understanding of the field of knowledge discovery in data and data mining. Two research paper awards are granted: Best Research Paper Award Recipients and Best Student Paper Award Recipients.

Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper)

Winning the ACM SIGKDD Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper) is widely considered an internationally recognized significant achievement in a researcher's career. Authors compete with established professionals in the field, such as tenured professors, executives, and eminent industry experts from top institutions. It is common to find press articles and news announcements from the awardees’ institutions and professional media to celebrate this achievement.

This award recognizes innovative scholarly articles that advance the fundamental understanding of the field of knowledge discovery in data and data mining. Each year, the award is given to authors of the strongest paper by this criterion, selected by a rigorous process.

Selection Process

The selection process follows multiple rounds of peer reviews under stringent criteria. The selection committee consists of leading experts who provide insightful and independent analysis on the merits and degree of innovation of the scholarly articles submitted by each author. The reviewers are required to be recognized subject experts who had extensive contributions to the specific subject area addressed by the paper. Reviewers are also required to be completely unaffiliated with the authors.

First, all papers submitted to the ACM SIGKDD conference are reviewed by research track program committee members. Each submitted paper is extensively reviewed by multiple committee members and detailed feedback is given to each author. After review, decisions are made by the committee members to accept or reject the paper based on the paper’s novelty, technical quality, potential impact, clarity, and whether the experimental methods and results are clear, well executed, and repeatable. During the process, committee members also evaluate the merits of each paper based on above factors, and make decision on recommending candidates for Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper).

The candidates for Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper) are extensively reviewed by conference chairs and the best paper award committee. The final determination of the award is based on the level of advancement made by authors through the paper to the understanding of the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. Authors of a single paper who are judged to have contributed the highest level of advancement to the field are selected as recipients of this award. Anyone who submits a scholarly article to SIGKDD is considered for this award.

Previous winners

The ACM SIGKDD Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper) was given to 49 individuals between 1997 and 2014. Among these individuals, most are distinguished persons and established professionals with celebrated careers, who have made significant contributions to the field.

Year Name Position Affiliation 1997 Foster Provost Professor New York University 1997 Tom Fawcett Principal Data Scientist Silicon Valley Data Science 1998, 1999 Pedro Domingos Professor University of Washington 2000 Anne Rogers Associate Professor University of Chicago 2000 Daryl Pregibon (Former) Head of Statistical Research AT&T Labs and Bell Labs 2000 Kathleen Fisher Chair & Professor Tufts University 2000 Corinna Cortes Head of Research Google 2001 Ruben H. Zamar Professor University of British Columbia 2001 Raymond T. Ng Professor University of British Columbia 2001 Edwin M. Knorr Tenured Senior Instructor University of British Columbia 2002 Padhraic Smyth Professor University of California, Irvine Associate Director Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems 2002 Darya Chudova VP of Bioinformatics Guardant Health 2003 Éva Tardos Professor & Dean Cornell University 2003, 2005 Jon Kleinberg Professor Cornell University Member National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2003 David Kempe Associate Professor University of Southern California 2004 Raymond J. Mooney Professor The University of Texas at Austin 2004 Mikhail (Misha) Bilenko Head of AI and Research Yandex 2004 Sugato Basu Principal Scientist Google 2004, 2005 Christos Faloutsos Professor Carnegie Mellon University Fellow ACM 2005 Jure Leskovec Associate Professor Stanford University Chief Scientist Pinterest Member, Board of Directors ACM SIGKDD 2006 Thorsten Joachims Chair & Professor Cornell University Fellow ACM, AAAI, Humboldt 2007 Srujana Merugu Principal Data Scientist Flipkart 2007 Deepak Agarwal VP of Engineering LinkedIn Fellow American Statistical Association Member, Board of Directors ACM SIGKDD 2008 Wei Wang Chair & Professor University of California, Los Angeles Director Scalable Analytics Institute 2008 Fei Zhou Professor University of Florida 2008 Xiang Zhang Associate Professor Pennsylvania State University 2009 Yehuda Koren Staff Research Scientist Google 2010 Carlos Guestrin Director of Machine Learning Apple Inc Professor University of Washington Co-founder, CEO Turi (a.k.a. Dato, GraphLab) 2010 Dafna Shahaf Assistant Professor The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010 Kai-Wei Chang Assistant Professor University of California, Los Angeles 2010 Cho-Jui Hsieh Assistant Professor University of California, Davis 2010 Hsiang-Fu Yu Applied Scientist Amazon 2010 Chih-Jen Lin Distinguished Professor National Taiwan University Fellow ACM, AAAI, IEEE 2011 Claudia Perlich Chief Scientist Dstillery Adjunct Professor New York University 2011 Saharon Rosset Associate Professor Tel Aviv University 2011 Shachar Kaufman Senior Data Scientist Metromile 2012 Thanawin Rakthanmanon Assistant Professor Kasetsart University, Thailand 2012 Bilson Campana Staff Software Engineer Google 2012 Abdullah Mueen Assistant Professor University of New Mexico 2012 Gustavo Batista Associate Professor Universidade de São Paulo 2012 Brandon Westover Director, Critical Care EEG Monitoring Service Massachusetts General Hospital 2012 Qiang Zhu Data Science Manager Airbnb 2012 Jesin Zakaria Software Engineer Microsoft 2012 Eamonn Keogh Professor University of California, Riverside 2013 Edo Liberty Principal Scientist Amazon Group Manager Amazon AI Algorithms 2014 Alex Smola Director of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Amazon Professor Carnegie Mellon University 2014 Sujith Ravi Staff Research Scientist Google 2014 Amr Ahmed Staff Research Scientist Google 2014 Aaron Li Founder Qokka.ai (Former) Lead Inference Engineer Scaled Inference

Best Student Paper Award

This only difference between "Best Student Paper Award" and "Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper)" is the limitation in competition.

All authors participating the conference are considered equally for "Best Paper Award (Best Research Track Paper)", and the award does not limit competition to any particular region, population, or age group.

However, "Best Student Paper Award" is limited to student authors only. "Best Student Paper Award" recognizes papers presented at the annual SIGKDD conference, with a student as a first author, that advance the fundamental understanding of the field of knowledge discovery in data and data mining.

KDD-Cup SIGKDD sponsors the KDD Cup data mining competition every year in conjunction with the annual conference. It is aimed at members of the industry and academia, particularly students, interested in KDD.

SIGKDD Explorations SIGKDD has also published a biannual academic journal titled SIGKDD Explorations since June 1999 when Usama Fayyad took on role of Founding Editor-inChief as ACM SIGKDD was formed. Editors in Chief: Charu Aggarwal (since 2014) Bart Goethals (2010–2013) Osmar R. Zaiane (2008–2010) Ramakrishnan Srikant (2006–2007) Sunita Sarawagi (2003–2006) Usama Fayyad (Founding Editor-in-Chief) (1999–2002)

People The original founding board of directors of SIGKDD in 1998 consist of: Won Kim, president, Cyber Database Solutions, SIGKDD Chair Rakesh Agrawal, IBM Almaden, SIGKDD Secretary/Treasurer Usama Fayyad, Microsoft Research, SIGKDD Director and Editor-in-Chief of SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Knowledge Stream Partners, SIGKDD Director Daryl Pregibon, AT&T Labs, SIGKDD Director Padhraic Smyth, U. of California Irvine, SIGKDD Director

Current chair: Bing Liu (2013–)