Rakesh Agrawal

Developer of fundamental data mining concepts and technologies, Agrawal is well known for pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. IBM's commercial data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew out of his work. His research was incorporated into other IBM products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server and WebSphere Commerce Server, and influenced several other commercial and academic products, prototypes and applications.

His other technical contributions included Polyglot object-oriented type system, Alert active database system, Ode (Object database and environment), Alpha (extension of relational databases with generalized transitive closure), Nest distributed system, transaction management, and database machines. Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2006, Agrawal was named an IBM Fellow in 2002 and led the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Earlier, he was with the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill from 1983 to 1989. He also worked for three years at India's premier company, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.

Agrawal received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He also held a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT-Roorkee, and a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Bombay.

He has been granted more than 55 patents and published more than 150 research papers, many of them considered seminal. He wrote the 1st as well as 2nd highest cited of all papers in the fields of databases and data mining (13th and 15th most cited across all computer science as of February 2007 in CiteSeer). His papers have been cited more than 6,500 times, with more than 15 of them receiving more than 100 citations each. Agrawal is sometimes called the most cited author in the field of database systems.

His work has been featured in the New York Times Year in Review, the New York Times Science section, and several other publications. He has been the recipient of the ACM-SIGKDD First Innovation Award, ACM-SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award, VLDB 10-Yr Most Influential Paper Award, and the Computerworld First Horizon Award. Agrawal has been a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. Scientific American named him to the list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003. His most recent quest has been to use the Internet to bring the benefits of computing to the underserved.