A conversation with Professor Zhi-Hua Zhou

Abstract

I came into the KDD area in late 1990s. From my point of view, an important event of Chinese KDD development was the 3 PAKDD conference, which was held in Beijing in April 1999. That was the first international conference on KDD held in China, and it helped to form the Chinese KDD community. Later, in 2007 the 11 PAKDD conference was held in Nanjing, for which I was the program chair. The PAKDD 2007 conference attracted more than 730 submissions and more than 270 attendees from China as well as other Asia-Pacific countries/regions; I think this is a good sign of the growth of the Chinese KDD community. Another important event is the CCDM (China Conference on Data Mining) conference held in Yantai in August 2009. This is a biennial conference, sponsored by the Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition Technical Committee of the China Computer Federation (CCF), and the Machine Learning Technical Committee of the China Association of Artificial Intelligence (CAAI); fortunately I served as the general co-chair. The origin of the conference was two editions of China Conference on Classification Technology and Application (CCTA), held in 2005 and 2007, in Beijing and Zhengzhou, respectively. With the growth of the Chinese data mining community, and the lack of a domestic data mining conference, the CCTA conference changed to CCDM from 2009, while in 2011 the CCDM conference was held in Guangzhou, attracting about 150 attendees. I think the IEEE ICDM 2006 conference held in Hong Kong is also a milestone, which greatly promoted the communication of China and international KDD community. I believe KDD 2012 will definitely become a milestone.