Karypis wins PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award

George Karypis, a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, was honored with the Distinguished Contributions Award during the 2021 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD).

This conference is one of the longest established and leading international conferences in the areas of data mining and knowledge discovery, and the Distinguished Contributions Award is the highest award presented by the PAKDD. It recognizes significant and ongoing contributions in research and services to the advancement of the PAKDD community and series of conferences.

The PAKDD Steering Committee selected Karypis for his outstanding contributions to the field of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD), as well as his long participation in PAKDD.

Professor Karypis' research interests span the areas of data mining, high performance computing, information retrieval, collaborative filtering, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and scientific computing. His research has resulted in the development of software libraries for serial and parallel graph partitioning (METIS and ParMETIS), hypergraph partitioning (hMETIS), for parallel Cholesky factorization (PSPASES), for collaborative filtering-based recommendation algorithms (SUGGEST), clustering high dimensional datasets (CLUTO), finding frequent patterns in diverse datasets (PAFI), and for protein secondary structure prediction (YASSPP).

He has coauthored over 280 papers on these topics and two books (“Introduction to Protein Structure Prediction: Methods and Algorithms” (Wiley, 2010) and “Introduction to Parallel Computing” (Publ. Addison Wesley, 2003, 2nd edition)). In addition, he has served on the program committees of many conferences and workshops on these topics, and on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Social Network Analysis and Data Mining Journal, International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, the journal on Current Proteomics, Advances in Bioinformatics, and Biomedicine and Biotechnology. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE.

This is the second time that a CS&E professor has received this high honor. Jaideep Srivastava was recognized in 2013 for his contributions to the field of analytics, data mining, and machine learning.