Short bio

I joined Stern in 1989 after earning a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Courant Institute. My current research interests include knowledge discovery in databases (data mining), personalization and recommender systems. I have published results of my research in various ACM, IEEE, INFORMS and other computer science, IS, marketing, management science journals and conference proceedings. I serve on the editorial boards, organizing and program committees of various journals and conferences. I co-chaired the Program Committee of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) in 2003 and serve as a Conference Co-Chair of the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems to be held in New York in October 2009. My research was supported by NSF, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, and Centers for Advanced Technologies and for Research in Information Systems (NYU). In addition to NYU, I held visiting positions at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (Paris, France). My industry experience includes two years as a software developer in the high-tech industry and various consulting engagements. My comments on technology-related topics and articles about my work appeared in major press outlets.

Current Research Interests

Personalization Technologies and Customer Relationship Management

Recommender Systems
Computational Methods for Customer Modeling
Personalized Customer Targeting
Utilizing Contextual Information in Personalization Problems

Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Measures of "interestingness" of discovered patterns
Post-processing and expert-driven validation of data mining results
Managing large modelbases

Selected Publications (see my CV for the complete list)

See my research profile on: [Google Scholar][DBLP].

Recent Selected Publications (over the last two years - in chronological order)

“Using External Aggregate Ratings for Improving Individual recommendations”, Third ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, October 2009 (with A. Umyarov) [pdf]
“Experimental Comparison of Pre- and Post-filtering Approaches in Context-Aware Recommender Systems”, Third ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, October 2009 (with M. Gorgoglione, U. Panniello, C. Palmisano and A. Pedone) [short paper]
"Context-Aware Recommender Systems." Conditionally accepted to Handbook on Recommender Systems subject to minor revisions, Springer (with G. Adomavicius).
“Using External Aggregate Ratings for Improving Individual Recommendations.” Conditionally accepted to the ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), subject to minor revisions (with A. Umyarov).
“ReQuest: A Query Language for Customizing Recommendations”. To appear in the Information Systems Research (ISR) journal (with G. Adomavicius and R. Zheng) [pdf].
“Improving Personalization Solutions through Optimal Segmentation of Customer Bases”. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 21(3), March 2009 (with T. Jiang) [pdf].
“Personalization: The State of the Art and Future Directions.” In Business Computing, vol. 3 in Handbooks in Information Systems, Chapter 1, Emerald Publishing, 2009.
“Improving Collaborative Filtering Recommendations Using External Data.” IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, December 2008 (with A. Umyarov) [pdf].
"Partitioning Customers Using Overlapping Segmentation Methods", WITS, December 2008 (with R. Zheng).
“Using Context to Improve Predictive Models of Customers in Personalization Applications.” IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 20(11), November 2008 (with M. Gorgoglione and C. Palmisano) [pdf].
“The Long Tail of Recommender Systems and How to Leverage It.” ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, October 2008 (with Y-J Park) [pdf].
"Managing and Analyzing Large Collections of Data Mining Models." Communications of the ACM, 51(2), February 2008 (with Bing Liu) [pdf].
"Dynamic Micro Targeting: Fitness-Based Approach to Predicting Individual Preferences." IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. October 2007 (with T. Jiang) [pdf]. (the enhanced and extended version of the paper will appear in the Knowledge and Information Systems Journal (KAIS)).
"Leveraging Aggregate Ratings for Better Recommendations", ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, October, 2007 (with A. Umyarov)
"User Profiling with Hierarchical Context: An e-Retailer Case Study." Sixth International and Multidisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT'07), Denmark, August 2007 (with M. Gorgoglione and C. Palmisano). [pdf]

Recent Keynotes

"The Next Generation of Recommender Systems: Where the Netflix Prize Competition Brought Us Today and Where We Can Go from Here." Presented at the IS Symposium: IT Innovation in the Next Decade, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; July 6 - 7, 2009.
"From Marketing Science towards Marketing Engineering… and Back Again." Presented at the Marketing Meets Datamining Conference, University of Texas, Austin; August 22 - 23, 2009.

Selected professional services (see my CV for the complete list)

Member of the editorial boards of the following journals:

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (Founding Member: 1997 - present)
INFORMS Journal on Computing (2000 - 2007, Associate Editor; 2007 - present, Area Editor)
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (2009 – present)
Electronic Commerce Research Journal (2000 - 2008)
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2002 - 2006)
Journal of the Association for Information Systems (1999 - 2002)

Guest Editor of the Special Issues

International Journal on User Modeling and User-Adapted Interactions. Special issue on Data Mining for Personalization, Vol. 19, No 1-2, 2009.
Informs Journal on Computing. Special Issue on Mining Web-based Data for e-Business Applications, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003.
Decision Support Systems. Special Issue on knowledge discovery and its applications to business. Vol. 21, 1997.

Organizing Committee Member (Selected Conferences):

Eleventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-10), Senior Program Committee Member, Cambridge, MA, June 2010.
Third ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Conference Co-Chair, New York, October 2009.
Annual INFORMS Meeting, Data Mining Cluster Co-Chair, Washington, D.C., October 2008.
The ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Large-Scale Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize Competition, Chair of the Organizing Committee, Las Vegas, August 2008.
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Panels Chair, Las Vegas, August 2008.
Annual INFORMS Meeting, Data Mining Cluster Co-Chair, Seattle, November 2007.
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Senior PC Member, San Jose, August 2007
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Program Committee Vice-Chair, Hong Kong, 2006.
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Member of the Research Contributions and Outstanding Service Awards Committee, 2006.
IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and Logistics, and Informatics, Advisory Board Member, Shanghai, 2006.
International Workshop on Customer Relationship Management: Data Mining Meets Marketing, Co-Chair, New York, 2005.
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Program Committee Co-Chair, Melbourne, Florida, 2003.
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Best Paper Awards Committee Chair, Melbourne, Florida, 2003.
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Panels Chair, Boston, 2000.

Program Committee Member

ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 1995 - 1998; 2000 - 2004; 2007.
IEEE International Conference on Data Mining: 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Pittsburgh, June 2006.
ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, October 2008.
SIAM Data Mining Conference: 2002
International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS): 2006, 2007
Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS): 1995, 2002 - 2009.
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2007, 2010.
Workshop on Intelligent Techniques in Web Personalization: 2001, 2003, 2005 - 2007.
International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB): 2001
International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (TIME): 2001, 2002.
International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER): 1997, 1998

This page was last revised in August 2009.