People & Positions:

Troy, NY Resident Wins Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Mohammed Zaki, assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award, aimed at young faculty members actively engaged in research and education, is one of the NSF's most competitive and prestigious awards.

Zaki, a resident of Troy, received a five-year, $300,000 grant for his SPIDER (Scalable, Parallel, and Interactive Data Mining and Exploration at Rensselaer) project, in which he creates novel data-mining techniques for bioinformatics, materials informatics, and astronomy. These novel data-mining techniques will make it easier for organizations to draw valuable information from huge mounds of unused data.

Data mining searches a database for interesting information that can, for example, be used to determine how well a company's Web site is structured, to predict the 3-D shape of a protein, or to detect interesting structure-property relationships for materials.

Zaki hopes that his techniques, when developed, will be used by the end user and not experts alone. Current data mining technology is often too complex and specific for general users, according to Zaki.

Zaki received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science, both from the University of Rochester, in May 1995 and July 1998, respectively. He received his B.S. in computer science and mathematics in 1993 from Angelo State University, Texas. He has published more than 40 papers on data mining and parallel computing and has co-chaired several workshops on the topic. He is the editor of Large-scale Parallel Data Mining (2000) and is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.