A conversation with Dr. Yong Shi

Abstract

1. Please share with us your view on the history and important milestones of the Chinese KDD research and application areas. Chinese KDD or Data Mining research started from the early 1990's when the first group of international KDD communities was formed. Since the demand of using information technology (IT), including computing tools, and Internet communications, was growing in Chinese economic reform, many scholars in universities and institutes have paid attention on KDD related research. A number of books in the field, such as Artificial Intelligence by Ruqian Lu (1996 in Chinese) and Knowledge Discovery by Zhongzhi Shi (2011 in Chinese), have recorded the progress of KDD in China. These works have also influenced young generations who were working on KDD at home and aboard. In recent years, Chinese governmental branches and industries have built their own databases. Some of them, especially China's commercial banks and mobile communication industries, have been migrating the databases into data warehouse and applying techniques of KDD to solve their business decision making problems. Chinese ICT (information and communications technology) market becomes the largest one in the world. For example, there are 457 Chinese million using Internet service in 2011. It was forecasted that by 2015, the Internet population of Chinese will reach 1.2 billion. As a significant number of researchers from both research institutes and universities are showing their increasing interest in doing various KDD problems, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has sponsored a large number of KDD proposals since 1990's. According to China's National Science and Technology Development Mid-Long Term Planning (2006-2020), " theories and methods of large-scale information processing and knowledge mining " have been identified as one of the key supporting technologies in fundamental scientific research for the national prioritized strategic needs. This has demonstrated that Chinese government's strong commitment on KDD related research and applications 2. Please describe your expertise and contribution to KDD. With the multidisciplinary nature of KDD, financial markets, environmental sciences and public management, CASFEDS has three major functions: fundamental and theoretical development, application-oriented research, and thank tank of Chinese government. For the last seven years, CASFEDS has been granted more than 30 million RMB by NSFC, the Ministry of Chinese Science and Technology, CAS and National Audit Office of China for its KDD related research projects. It has published more than 300 research papers in the international journals and conferences, including a number …