Usama Fayyad

Usama Fayyad is Chairman & CTO of ChoozOn Corporation -- a personalized service that helps people find the best and most relevant deals and offers in the chaos of the deal economy. He is also Executive Chairman of Oasis500 (www.oasis500com) targeting investing and accelerating 500 startups in the Middle East. A pioneer in the world of Big Data andone of the founders of the fields of data mining and data strategy, he was formerly Yahoo!'s Chief Data Officer and Executive VP and founder of Yahoo!'s Research organization. A serial entrepreneur who founded his first startup, Audience Science in 2000 after leaving Microsoft, Usama sold his second company, DMX Group, to Yahoo! in 2004 and remained on Yahoo!'s senior executive team till late 2008. Prior to ChoozOn Usama was founder and CEO of Open Insights, a data strategy and data mining technology firm working with the largest on-line and mobile companies in the world. Usama's professional experience also includes 5 years at Microsoft directing the data mining and exploration efforts and developing data mining products for Microsoft's Server Division. Prior to Microsoft he was with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he did award-winning work on the automated exploration of massive scientific databases. Usama earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, and holds advanced degrees in electrical and computer engineering, and in mathematics. Usama is also active in academic communities and is a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; he is Chairman of the ACM SIGKDD. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of primary Data Mining scientific journal and the SIGKDD Explorations newsletter as well as author of two books in Data Mining. He has over 100 published papers and over 25 patents.