A conversation with Professors Deyi Li and Jie Tang

Roughly speaking, Chinese KDD research mainly underwent three stages. It was in 1993 when National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) started to sponsor research on knowledge discovery and data mining. This can be considered as the first stage. The major research around that time was focused on “Knowledge Discovery from Database”, including sub-topics such as frequent mining and association rule mining from databases. The research was mainly conducted in academic institutes. The second stage started from the end of 1990’s, with the emergence and the rapid proliferation of Web-based applications. People started to notice that the largest data source for mining is the information on the Web instead of traditional databases. At the same time the mining tasks became more diversified. In the second stage, the term “Web Mining” became popular in the field. Research labs on “knowledge engineering”, “web/internet mining” have been built in different research institutes and rapidly developed. Several web search companies also emerged in this stage such as Baidu and Sogou. The third stage began around 2005, when online social applications and media (such as, in China, Tencent, Sina Weibo, Renren) become a prevalent and complex force to influence our daily life. Indeed, Tencent, the largest social network in China, already has more than 700 million registered users, the same number of Facebook; Sina Weibo has attracted 250 million users in the past two years, a figure higher than Twitter. These online networks grow very fast and they provide a huge amount of user generated content, which presents great opportunities in understanding the science of these networks. Accordingly, the emphasis of the research started to switch to mining social networks. This is a more diverse research field, attracting researchers from a wide range of academic fields, including theory and algorithms, data mining and machine learning, computer systems and networks, statistical physics and complex systems, social psychology, economics and managerial science. Another important change in this stage is that Chinese companies are paying more and more attention to data mining research. Not only Chinese Internet companies (e.g., Tencent, Baidu, Sogou, Youdao, etc.) but also communication/hardware IT companies (e.g., China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo) started to build data mining research labs. There is little doubt that for now it is the best time for data mining in China.