Guest editorial

Funding

Hillol Kargupta received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1996. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engi-neering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore. He is also a co-founder of Agnik LLC, Columbia, Maryland, a ubiquitous data intelligence company. His research interests include mobile and distributed data mining and computation in gene expression. His research has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, US Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, NASA, and various other organizations. He has published more than seventy five peer-reviewed articles in journals, conferences, and books. He has co-edited two books: Advances in Distributed and Parallel Knowledge Discovery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000) and Data Mining: Next Generation Challenges and Future Directions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). He is currently working on a Distributed Data Mining text book. He served as the Associate General Chair of the 2003 ACM SIGKDD Conference. He is also the Program Co-Chair of the 2005 SIAM Data Mining Conference. He was the chair of the 2002 NSF Next Generation Data Mining Workshop. He is involved with many conferences, workshops, and special issues in this area. He regularly serves as an invited speaker in many international conferences and workshops. Dr. Kargupta won a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2001 for his research on ubiquitous and distributed data mining. He, along with his co-authors, received the best paper award in the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining for a paper on privacy-preserving data mining. He won the 2000 TRW Foundation Award and the 1997 Los Alamos Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement. His dissertation earned him the 1996 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) annual best student paper prize. He is Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, CYBERNETICS, PART B. He is currently a Research Scientist at the Computational Biology Institute and Computer Science and Mathematics Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). His research areas include distributed data mining, computational biology, genetic computing, data stream analysis, and text mining. His research activities are currently supported by the Genomes-to-Life program of the Department of Energy (DOE), Scientific Data Management (SDM) of DOE SciDAC program, and the Biodefense Knowledge Center projects of Department of Homeland Security. Before joining the ORNL, he was with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Catonsville, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, where he was involved in NASA EOS distributed data mining project. He served on the program committees of several data mining conferences and workshops. He also serves as a reviewer of numerous journals and conferences.