KAIST

Professor Kyu-Young Whag

Dr. Kyu-Young Whang, Distinguished Professor from the Department of Computer Science, KAIST, has received the 2014 Distinguished Contributions Award from the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD). PAKDD is the leading academic international conference on data mining held in Asia/Pacific. This year’s international conference was held from 13th to 15th May at Tainan, Taiwan.

As a life member of the PAKDD Steering Committee, Professor Whang worked for the development of the data mining field in the Asia-Pacific region, and his contribution to the international database and data-mining field has been widely recognized.

The PAKDD Distinguished Contributions Award has been awarded to a total of six people until now, including Professor Whang, and he is the first Korean to receive this award.

Professor Whang has also a history of receiving the Outstanding Contributions Award in 2011 from the Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), the prestigious database academic conference in the Asia-Pacific region. The database and data mining field in the region was barren 20 years ago, but through the efforts and contributions of many researchers, including Professor Whang, it has now leapt to the level of being the equal of North American and European researchers.

In fact, three academic organizations in the current international database field are led by professors in the Asia-Pacific region. The IEEE ICDE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Data Engineering) is led by Professor Whang; the VLDB (Very Large Data Base) Endowment by Professor Beng Chin Ooi from National University of Singapore (NUS); and the ACM SIGMOD (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data) by Professor Don Kossmann from ETH Zurich.