A conversation with Professor Bo Zhang

In the 11 international joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI’89), in 1989, Piatetsky-Shapiro and colleagues led a seminar on knowledge discovery in databases, which signaled the coming of age for the field of data mining. Soon after, in 1993, data mining research officially begun by first being supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). This was viewed as the beginning of data mining research in China. Thus, China was among the pioneers in data mining research given that the time gap was only 4 years. Afterwards, major research activities on both fundamental research and practical applications can be found in many research institutions and universities, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Institute of Computing Technology in Chinese Academy of Science, Nanjing University, and many others. In these institutions, applications of data mining cover a broad range of areas including finance, business, transportation, medicine, energy, etc. However, before the 21 century, due to the shortage of data, China’s KDD research was still limited in terms of theoretical depth and types of applications. This period can be considered a warm-up period, in which Chinese researchers were learning and following international major KDD research directions.